


Inked

by swimmingfox



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A bit dark and angsty actually, Bagels, Brick Lane, East London specifically, Eggy bread, F/F, F/M, Hipsters, Leytonstone, London, Modern AU, SanSan forever, Sandor is getting a tattoo, Shoreditch, Tattoos, sansan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 00:44:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8512162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swimmingfox/pseuds/swimmingfox
Summary: Sandor gets his first tattoo. Sansa works at the parlour. Set in East London, yo.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tommyginger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tommyginger/gifts).



> This is something I started ages ago, and I am simply putting it up because Tommyginger asked on tumblr for fanfic to disappear into on USA election results day. Believe me, we feel your pain over here. Set in once-cool-now-a-bit-touristy-really Shoreditch, East London, a place where people of all ages and backgrounds mix pretty merrily. I reckon Sansa's 23, and Sandor 36.

Dead. He was dead.

Sandor walked from the tube, past the Turkish kebab shops and the bar that pretended to be for bikers but was only for tourists who didn’t know any better, past the Vietnamese cafés and the stupid health food place where they sold nut bars for three quid, thinking of the man who would no longer haunt him. Not in this world, anyway.

The place was on his way home, sort of. This bit of town always rattled over his head after work on one of the first dawn trains going east, but it was in the right direction at least. Osha had recommended it – her exact words had been ‘the chicks are cute,’ accompanied by a filthy grin. But her arms were peppered with twisting plants and pirate girls and names of all her old boyfriends and – fuck it, it would do. 

Dawn commutes. Going home when the first shift workers were staring into space. He wouldn’t be doing that again. His phone buzzed in his pocket for the fifth time. ‘Get bent,’ he said, not enough under his breath for a guy overtaking him to glance round, eyebrows up. Sandor didn’t have to do much for the suit to turn back round and scuttle off to his poncy little Hoxton flat that only city wankers could afford now. The face was enough to make anyone turn tail and run, or to know not to give him any shit at the door, however coked-up they were, however badly they wanted to get in. He’d lived off this face, one way or the other.

Thanks for that, brother.

One more set of traffic lights, round a corner past a strip club, which was glitzy-looking, dicks outside hanging around for their mates, three parts swaggering to two parts ashamed, and –

‘Jesus,’ he said to himself. The window frames and the door were painted a deep pink, a pink that punched you in the face, the same colour painted round the sign, too. _Tarth’s Tattoos_. Well, this was it. Still, there were enough big wooden piercings and pictures of skulls in the window for it to not have been Osha’s big fucking joke. Not that he would have put it past her. Sly bitch.

Sandor took a deep breath. Hand on the door. No going back now. 

The sound of the bell mingled with three people talking over each other and music from – the West Indies? West Africa? Fuck knows – and the smell of chemicals and incense cramming themselves up his nostrils like they were trying to get away.

He walked to the little desk, just as the tall girl behind it said to the boy with a tattoo needle in his hand, ‘and _you_ would never do that, of course,’ before she turned round and beamed.

Red and white. That’s what she was. Long red hair, skin pale as a dove’s egg. A white shirt and a mouth the colour of a postbox. Jesus, Sandor thought again, but managed not to say. 

‘Hello,’ she said, as bright as that smile. White teeth against the lipstick. A smile that stopped getting any wider when she took in his face, but at least didn’t run headlong into a screech, or a howl of terror, or laughter, as it did with some of the clubbers as they queued up, looking for ways out of the boredom. 

Instead it turned into something more curious, sympathetic even, which was the worst, before she put her finger on a dog-eared book full of names and numbers, a girl’s scrawl. Red nails. ‘Um, Sandor, right?’ She pronounced it _Sahn-der_.

‘Aye, that’s me.’ Or near enough. He flung his eyes to the wall, to the African masks hanging there, to the display folders of sailor girls and barbed wire hearts, to anywhere but at her.

‘You’re a little early,’ she said. ‘We’re behind a bit anyway. Do you mind coming back in half an hour?’

Sandor looked at his watch irritably. He was five minutes shy of his appointment. ‘Guess I’ll have to be, won’t I?’

She looked thrown, just for a second, before standing a little straighter. ‘Yep. There are loads of coffee places. I’ll take it off your total at the end if you’re that bothered.’ A slight arch of the eyebrow, like a seagull turning in the breeze.

The guy wasn’t even here yet, anyway. ‘Forget it.’ He sighed and turned away, pretending not to notice that the buzzing sound from the boy’s gun had stopped as soon as he’d properly entered the shop. ‘Fine. Half an hour.’

The tattooist said something to the receptionist as he left, and he realised that it wasn’t a boy.

***

‘Did you see his face?’

Her little sister had the knack of being able to carry on a couple of conversations at once whilst inking. It didn’t always make her customers feel comfortable, their eyes sliding over to the wall, pretending not to care. But Arya was good at this. She had a particular style that she’d developed partly just from books and YouTube videos and covering every page of tons of sketchbooks - a quick, light style, almost like a paintbrush, that meant she was starting to get a name for herself. 

Sansa preferred small, detailed work. Geometric designs and close lines. Although both of them had to do what people asked, so that meant tons of stars and Celtic knots and roses and dolphins. Arya would roll her eyes and try and talk them into something a bit more inventive, but Sansa just tried to do the best job she could with what they seemed to want. 

‘Yes, I saw his face,’ Sansa said. She had seen his eyes, too. Tired, lined and dark, but with a wolfish streak of silver light in the grey. And heard the prickle of Scottish roughness in his voice.

‘Awesome,’ said Arya. ‘We get all the freaks and geeks in here.’ Her client gave a small yelp again as she finished a colour-in. ‘Man, you’re not enjoying this much, are you?’ 

***

He wasn’t going to go in any of these shite fucking hipster places. Laptops everywhere, stupid oversized glasses, coffees that cost four quid, where you had to say Americano and not just coffee otherwise the pink or green or blue-haired girl would look at you blankly.

Sandor wandered a few doors up, past the shops that sold leather shoes and bags, of which there seemed to be hundreds round here, a Chinese supermarket and a boarded-up pub with graffiti of a massive pelican all over it, before turning back towards the big church on the corner. There’d been a coffee stall there. 

Red hair, though. That was different. That girl had hair that made him think of whisky with firelight shining through it, and the way she tipped her head to the side took him back to his da, holding the glass, the liquid slanting. 

The churchyard seemed out of place here, with traffic going every which way, buses and bikes, flyposters for gigs for bands with shit names everywhere. _Sweet Baboo. Pure Bathing Culture. Youth Lagoon_. A drunk guy stumbled into him – there were a load of them hanging around by the side door. Homeless charity or AA maybe. ‘Watch where you’re fucking going,’ he said. Or maybe a bit of both. The man’s eyes were awash, gluey, half-dead.

Gregor was dead. He’d been in a coma for a month after the fight, and Sandor had gone and seen him twice, watched the jagged lines on the monitor, listened to the wheeze of the ventilator, said over and over in his head _die, you bastard. Die_.

He wandered round the churchyard with his coffee – his _Americano_ , the stall was no better – looking at the graves, the ivy gripping them in strangleholds, imagining his brother’s bones deep in the mud, rotting into earth.

Time to go back.

When he got back in, the red-white girl and the boy-that-was-a-girl were still the only ones in there, plus the shaven-headed guy with his arm out, the beginnings of a shit-looking lion taking shape. 

‘He not here yet?’ Sandor said.

‘Who?’

Christ. He’d been patient up until now. Saintly. ‘The guy who’s doing my bloody chest.’

The two of them exchanged a glance and he began to feel like he’d said something really bloody stupid. 

‘No guys here, unless you want Jojen downstairs’, said the smaller one. ‘But he’s our spearman. You wouldn’t want him drawing on you.’

‘I was in touch with Brian. The owner.’

She snorted. 

The tall girl, the one like a Christmas candy cane, smiled at him. ‘ _Brienne_. She was whisked away. Shotgun wedding. She emailed all of her clients, didn’t you get it? You had the choice of postponing until she came back.’

Sandor hadn’t looked at email for days. He hated email. He tucked his chin into his chest. ‘Who’s doing it, then?’

The girl was unbuttoning her shirt and swigging the dregs of a mug of tea. ‘Me.’ 

‘ _You?_ ’ He couldn’t help the surprise in his voice coming out as half a sneer.

‘I’ll give you a go in a bit, if you like, once I’m done.’ The little tattooist waved her gun in the air and the guy she was working in looked at Sandor, panic in his eyes. ‘Me and Needle are always ready.’

‘You haven’t got time,’ said the tall one. ‘You’ve got another one coming.’ She flicked a look up at Sandor. ‘You’d prefer a man, then, would you?’ She looked disappointed, as if she’d thought he might be something else and now found he was just a fucking misogynist prick. 

‘No, just someone who knows what they’re doing,’ Sandor said.

She took her shirt off, leaving a tight black vest and a load of necklaces. ‘I know what I’m doing,’ she said quietly, and Sandor tried not make the breath he took in audible. Underneath that pale shirt was not just candy-pale skin but an arm wrapped in tattoos. 

‘I’m Sansa,’ she said.

***

He was really nervous, though he was trying not to show it. Lots of the big guys were like that, all tough-acting until they got down to it. Girls would bring a friend, promise they hadn’t been drinking, though you could smell vodka on their breath as they merrily squealed away.

Sansa talked him through the design, which she’d taken from Brienne’s email and notes. She’d drawn it last night, a few times, wondering who might get something like this. As she spoke, she was aware that this large man was biting his lip, just tugging it into his teeth a little, and shifting around, almost imperceptibly.

‘Is it - your first tattoo?’ she said.

His eyes were on the wall. He seemed to prefer talking to the wall. ‘Aye.’

He looked like the sort of guy who would be covered in them. She softened a little and talked him through the basics. ‘I made its face a little more geometric on this side, to contrast with the other side, and I don’t know what you think about some softer edges at the bottom?’

The guy – Sandor, which was maybe like a Scottish version of Xander or something – just frowned at her drawings a lot and moved his head in a way that might have been a nod.

‘What size did you imagine?’

‘I dunno.’ He moved his hands apart. 

She looked at him, thinking _he’s so big_ , trying to think of the last person quite so tall that she’d tattooed. ‘I think we could go a bit larger, if you want. You’re built for it.’

His sigh sounded a bit like an old van revving up. ‘I’m putting a lot of trust in you, you know.’

‘I know. Ready?’

He was running his fingernails along his teeth. ‘As I’ll ever be,’ he said into them.

‘T-shirt off, then, please.’ And she patted the black leather of the reclining seat behind her.

***

This was it, then. He was going to let a girl swipe a needle all over his chest, and leave something there that was permanent. Irremovable. Fucking stuck there for all time.

‘Back in a sec.’ She disappeared into a side room with a swish of the beaded curtain from some ethnic backwater and he wondered what it would feel like to move her hair underneath his palm, have it fall over his fingers as he swept through it.

There was a guy squalling in some African language from the little speaker up in the corner, droney electric guitars behind him. Sandor sat back, feeling like a bloody idiot with his t-shirt off in a public place with all the lights on, the way it never was whenever some girl in the queue was drunk enough to take a punt and take him back to hers. Not that he ever asked – the few times it had happened it had always been them, eyes shining bright with the Es, a hand on his shoulder just to try and stay upright as the dawn light began to vomit itself up.

‘Don’t worry, she’s good.’ The little girl-boy was crouched over the guy’s arm, but seemed to be talking to Sandor. ‘You could go the Bolton’s, you know, further up Hackney Road? But they’d do a hatchet job on you. People are always getting infected. And they’re pretty heavily into body modification stuff there. They get a bit experimental on yo’ ass.’ The last bit said in a pretty shite faux-American accent. Jesus, how old was she? She looked about thirteen.

The look the other one – his _tattooist_ , Jesus Christ – had given him when she was thinking about the size of the tattoo – it had been thoughtful, assessing, the way that no girl ever looked at him much, because they were too busy being freaked out by his face. Sansa. What sort of name was that? Probably hippie parents to blame for that one. Other siblings called Tulip and Leaf and Misty. 

She was coming back, a transfer in her hand and some little bottles and some surgical gloves. Her empty tea mug on the side said KEEP CALM I’M A TATTOIST in that fucking derivative Blitz-spirit-bollocks type. Aye, really fucking calm, he thought, as she sat down. I’m letting this girl stab me about fifteen hundred times.

‘OK,’ she said, and placed the transfer very close to his skin, sitting down at the same time and pulling a mirror over which she held in front of him. Just to give him the idea, he supposed. ‘How’s that?’

It sat right in the middle of his breastplate, and would spread not quite to his nipple on either side. He took a deep breath. ‘Aye. That’s fine.’ 

‘Great.’ She beamed again. Another flash of those teeth, good as a tequila shot. ‘So, we’ll just need to get that hair off.’

Sandor looked down. ‘Is it not enough?’ He’d spent a bit of time last night looking up tattoo forum websites, it feeling far dirtier than watching Bosnian porn, trying to find out what he was supposed to do there, and as far as he could work out he just needed to get the worst off. He’d stood in front of the mirror with a Bic razor feeling like a bloody drag queen. Aye, that would be a career change.

‘Not quite,’ she said, and there was a tiny smile. She wheeled round on her backless chair and fished out a razor and some cream from a cupboard.

He sat up. ‘Where can I go, then?’

She looked slightly puzzled before her face cleared. ‘Oh no, we’re quite used to it. Back you go.’

***

Sansa didn’t think she had ever had anyone be quite so uncomfortable as this. Usually they pretended a bit more by now, or just became gung-ho about the whole thing. Made jokes to everyone in the room, talked loudly.

This guy, Sandor, could seem to hardly bear her touching him, which didn’t bode well for the main show. She pressed the nozzle again on the shaving gel, and wiped it across his chest with her fingers. A lot of guys seemed to like having tattoos partly covered up by their chest hair. Maybe they felt more natural, more part of them.

He was looking at the ceiling now, occasionally shifting and making a not-very-quiet grumbling sound.

‘It’s best if you don’t move,’ she said, not looking up.

‘Ok.’ He shifted again.

‘You won’t move when I’m actually tattooing you, will you?’

‘No.’

She grinned, a tiny one. ‘Then you might want to practise that now.’ 

He did have quite a lot of hair on his chest, though not as much as one or two of the guys that had come in, usually older, basically gorillas from the neck down. She didn’t mind shaving this guy quite so much. His stomach looked like something you could hurt yourself punching, though there was a bit of softness to the sides of him. There was a huge bruise covering his left shoulder that must have been something pretty painful. Maybe he was a builder. 

She couldn’t help but glance up once or twice at his face, too. He was staring so concertedly at the ceiling that he didn’t notice. _What happened to you_ , she thought. The scars were so deep, as if a huge bear had gouged his claws into him. Maybe he was a survivalist, like one of those guys on tv who bounded around jungles looking for things to attack them. The beard covered them a bit, but there were pretty fearsome. One of them just missed his eye, tugging down the corner a little.

He caught her eye. Damn. ‘You done?’

She went back to it, properly. ‘Almost.’ She shaved the final hairs, a large moon of pale flesh now clear, and patted him dry, before getting the transfer in place, making it absolutely straight.

‘It’s going to look good,’ she said.

He looked at her in a way that seemed both a challenge and something rather more vulnerable. His slow blink was enough to tell her to reach for her tattoo gun, and remind him not to move again. 

She turned the gun on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love everyone! Spread the love and joy! *sob* Feeling horrified and emotional this morning about the death of everything. EVERYTHING EXCEPT FANFIC, THAT IS. x


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blrrghghg, sorry for the delay on this one. It will be short and sweet, if possibly sporadic! Real Life Things getting in the way.

Jesus fucking bloody hellChrist fuck.

OK, that hurt a bit more than he was expecting. Everyone had tattoos. Kids, girls, everyone. He didn’t expect it to hurt quite as bloody much. Fuck. It was like someone slicing him open.

‘You ok so far?’ she said, her eyes flicking up for a nanosecond. He was half-prostrate on a black leather reclining seat with his t-shirt off and she was sitting right by the side of him, leaning over, her elbow close to his crotch.

‘Aye,’ he said. Aye, just dandy, with your needle scraping itself into my flesh. 

‘It’ll hurt a bit more on the bone,’ she said. ‘I’ll try and vary it so you don’t get too much in one place. But just say.’

Fucking hell. Just say. He couldn’t say _stop, for the love of god, you’re fucking killing me_. She’d only just bloody started. He was a guy, and this girl had tattoos all the way up her arm, and that little girl-boy tattooist had a ton of them, too, so he could bloody well do it. _Christ_.

‘So did you get off work early today, then?’ She didn’t stop moving the tattoo gun as she spoke. The heel of her hand resting right on the middle of his chest, wiping ink away as she went.

‘Don’t you need to concentrate or something?’

‘It helps to talk.’

‘How does it help you?’

‘Not me. You. With the pain.’ Her voice got quieter, as if she was talking to herself. ‘A lot of people prefer it, anyway.’ 

There was something clinical about it. Like she was a nurse and he was just some patient in a flimsy pea-green gown that she had to take to the loo. Yet at the same time there she was, this girl in her black skinny top and her black skinny jeans, with her hair sliding over her shoulder, and he could bloody smell her. Over the smell of the ink, it was the smell of - he didn’t know, cinnamon, something woody anyway. 

And fuckChrist, there it was again, pain like an animal hanging off you by the teeth. Fine. He would talk. ‘How long have you been doing this, then?’ he said. Aye, nice one. Original. 

‘Not long.’

‘Fucking great.’

She removed her gun, looked up at him with a little exasperation mixed in with the calmness. ‘I’m fully trained. People like my work. You can stop and read my reviews if you like.’ 

It didn’t really hurt any less with the gun taken away. Skin just screaming for respite. He opened his mouth to speak, and instead just shook his head and then nodded, and off she went, torturing him again.

***

God, he was so suspicious. Most people were pretty damned nice to her by this stage, because she was inking them and they desperately didn’t want her to do anything wrong. He seemed to practically want to sabotage the whole thing.

Sansa decided to stop talking and just concentrate. No way in hell would she ever do something spiteful – that would be insane. She would just do a fucking good job and kick him right out of the door with his aftercare slip. 

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Bit nervous.’

She glanced at him. His eyes were on the ceiling, and one of his hands was gripping the arm of the chair, knuckles white. She softened. Tried not to show it as she wiped away a little more excess. ‘Why did you choose this, then?’ Asked quite coolly, purely for professional reasons.

He didn’t say anything for ages and she told herself to just shut up, listen to Arya gabbling on about bands and football and telly to the guy sitting not far from them, focus on the outline. 

He was so big. His sort were normally covered in tattoos, and here was this man, getting his first. His pale chest was so broad – you could have a girl lying on each side of him, using him as a pillow. Or two guys. He didn’t strike her as gay, but you never knew. Sansa had learnt not to judge.

‘My brother died,’ he said.

She looked up, brought the gun away quickly, just to be safe. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

His eyes slid to hers. ‘Are you?’

‘I – it’s just what people say. I just meant I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Aye, I know they do.’ He sounded as dark as raw chocolate. 

Right. Time to shut up again. Sansa went back to her work, her hand on the upper part of his chest.

‘He died in a fight,’ he said. She glanced up at him. God. ‘Boxing, I mean. Not far from here, as it happens.’

A local news story came filtering back to Sansa. They held big matches at York Hall in Bethnal Green. A big guy, huge, going down. Brain damage, maybe. ‘I think I heard about that,’ she said. Careful not to say I’m sorry again. She rested the side of her hand on his chest. ‘So this is for your brother.’

There was that streak of silver in his eyes, just for a second, before they hardened again. ‘Nope. This is for me.’

***

For a long time, Sandor had tried not to think about the place he was from. When he’d been growing up, it was a place of wide skies and rivers that talked to him. His kingdom. But a kingdom that always needed hiding places, because he never knew when his brother would come looking for him.

The oldest, the loudest, the biggest. When Sandor was on his own, just one of the dogs for company, he would shout his head off, hear it bounce off the sheer face of a mountain, maybe startle a couple of walkers. But when he was at home, he kept his mouth shut.

It wasn’t enough. Whatever he did, he seemed to drive his brother mad. Made a sound, didn’t make a sound, brought him a drink, didn’t bring him one, brought him the wrong one. Gregor would hold him down under the duvet and thump him, kick him in the ankle as he walked past. Their da would just look over his paper after a long day with the dogs, say one name or the other, as if they were the same.

They were not the same. Sandor loved the dogs. Helped his da with the injections, cleaned the pens out, learnt about the training. Gregor did none of that, roaring around on his motorbike when he was fourteen, teachers banning him from the classroom, rumours of a lass having an abortion. He took the piss out of his little brother for mucking the dogs out, trying to get them to heel over and over. Said he should be practising that on girls, not fucking dogs. Once, Sandor saw him kick one of the pregnant bitches in the belly in the yard.

Gregor didn’t care about the dogs. Except for one.

***

Sansa liked doing black and grey ones. It was a challenge, only using shading and not colour. Shadows and lines. It seemed to fit him. The black-grey eyes, the dark beard. He had lines at the corners of his eyes, lines that bled into his scars on the one side, and she wondered how old he was. Could be anything from thirties to forties, though she fancied he’d lived a little and was on the younger side. 

Dark shadows under his eyes, too, like he needed to sleep. There were scars lower down on his side at the edge of his waistband, faint spidery ones. _This is for me_ , he’d said, and stared at the ceiling again. A pregnant pause that turned into a long silence, and for once, she felt like she wanted to know more. She was starting to realise that his silence wasn’t just rudeness. That he probably had lots to say, if he trusted the person enough. He wasn’t going to be someone who just prattled on.

People told her all sorts here. It was like she was a psychotherapist just as much as a tattoo artist. They’d blurt out all their secrets, partly just to distract themselves. It was amazing what would come out – a guy once told her he’d pretended to be his son’s father when in fact it was his friend’s, a woman said how she’d faked death, another man said how he’d got caught sleeping with his girlfriend’s mother.

The man – Sandor – shifted and Sansa stopped to let him settle again. His skin was very warm under her arm, and his breath smelt of coffee and spearmint, which was a lot better than some. She could tell how much it was hurting him, but knew he was one of those people who wouldn’t say. Arya beat all of them though – she would just yawn and close her eyes, as if being tattooed was so relaxing that she could just go to sleep.

***

‘Just popping out for a ciggie.’ The other tattooist stood up and went past them to the back, putting her hand in the pocket of a leather jacket. ‘Do we need anything, San-San?’

‘Milk, please.’ Sandor’s tattooist didn’t look up. She was closer than any girl had ever been – well, that wasn’t true, not exactly, but she was staring at him more intently than any girl ever had. At his skin, anyway. There were wolves and birds on her arm, and a castle turret, and a key. Flowers wrapped round lots of it.

‘Two ticks, bruv,’ said the girl to the guy she was tattooing, and the bell jangled. 

Sandor could hear the guy whimpering under his breath. Probably in relief at the respite. Know how you feel, mate, he thought, vowing not to bloody show his pain out loud. Listening to the buzz of the gun, which was like a really pissed off wasp.

San-San. ‘What did you say your name was?’ He’d maybe not heard it right. 

‘Sansa,’ she said, quietly. 

‘How do you two know each other, then?’ She was right. Talking was best.

‘She’s my sister.’

They couldn’t be much less alike if one had a different skin colour. Tall to short, boy to girl. ‘Right. Proper family business.’

‘Not really. Arya was here first. I – came into it later.’ She sounded more hesitant. Careful, though trying to hide it.

He didn’t know what to say, and just hummed in a way that would encourage her to talk more, if she felt like it. 

The tattoo gun buzzed. Now it was her not saying anything. Speak, for fuck’s sake, he thought, wondering if he could keep humming, like yoga hipsters did, to blot out the bastard levels of pain being etched into his chest. Buzz. Buzz.

‘I was estranged,’ she said. ‘For a while.’ She glanced up at him, a flick of eyeliner, and he thought of two ravens or crows, and smaller birds, flying upwards. All black. 

***

After everything, it still amazed Sansa that she enjoyed this so much. The strange intimacy of it. After everything, she would have thought that the last thing she would want would be flesh in her face. After Petyr.

But this was different. Once she’d found Arya again, and seen where she was working, it didn’t take long for the bug to bite. Both getting her own tattoos – Brienne had done the first two, and Arya the others, working them into a bigger design – and beginning to learn herself. She traced and copied, practised on apples and oranges, used henna, and eventually began to make her own designs.

She’d always been good at drawing. And this was something else – there was a trust, her gun and their skin, a bond that she made with people that allowed her to be in charge, allowed her to trust people again. Maybe that was it – they gave themselves up to her, became vulnerable rather than her feeling so.

It wasn’t really far away enough, but Arya always said that West Londoners never came out east, or that at least she sure as hell wouldn’t go there, and then she’d wave Needle around and talk about tattooing cocks all over Petyr’s face and faces all over his cock and then maybe murdering him anyway. Brienne would always sit Sansa down when she had her panic attacks, talk calmly about the counselling and therapy groups and – it had turned out that this was better. She was with her sister. She drew and she inked. She was the confessional box for a colourful range of East Londoners.

And she’d done every sort of tattoo imaginable – a woman who must have been nearly eighty wanted a rose on her arm, a boy who wanted his back to be covered in flowers, a guy who wanted a horse’s head on his back, and insisted on it being exactly like the one in his photo, a man who was completely hairless who just wanted a plain box on his hip.

There was something about this man, though. She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d just told him that, about her family. She never had before. 

***

Two hours and Sandor had got used to it, in the way that you might get used to someone punching you in the face over and over. There’d been a bit more talking, just about local things, the constant shite in the news, her sister sticking her oar in from the other seat and threatening to tattoo that cunt Farage’s face on her client with when he said that he’d voted for Leave. 

_Estranged_ , Sansa had said, and her voice had grown subdued, mixing in with the sound of the gun. There was something sad about her underneath the confidence. He hadn’t detected it at first, but it was there, quiet and lean. She’d seen some shit, this girl. 

The bell went.

‘Hey there, dreamers.’

‘What up.’ The little squirt greeted the girl who’d just walked in, dark curls and a tattooed neck, before wiping the arm of her client and patting him on an un-inked bit further up. ‘You’re done, mate.’ She leant over and started unwrapping cling film.

‘Thank Christ,’ the guy said, his voice just a squeak. ‘You’re a torturer.’

‘You love it,’ she said, kicking her seat as he got his wallet out with a shaking hand. Kicking it some more as she took the wad of notes. ‘Magic. See you next time, Polliver.’ She grinned. ‘Such a wimp,’ she said before he’d even shut the door properly. ‘It’s always the guys. Never the girls.’

‘That’s because we are way harder,’ said the girl with the curly hair, before leaning over and kissing the tattooist. On the mouth. 

‘ _You_ make me hard,’ said Arya to her.

Sandor felt the breath of a small, closed-lip laugh from Sansa on his chest. A tiny Highlands breeze. 

‘Coming?’ her sister said to her.

‘I’m not done here.’

The other tattooist's eyes rested on his face again for half a second, quick and dismissive. ‘Finish him tomorrow. You’ve been going for ages.’

Her wrist rested on his shoulder blade. ‘No, it’s cool.’

The girl's eyes narrowed. ‘Alright. Call me if you need me.’ She seemed in charge, suddenly, the little sister. She looked at him again, harder, a look that threatened worse than a tattoo gun. 

‘I will,’ Sansa said, not looking up.

‘Jojen!’ the girl yelled, hand on the rail of the steps to the basement.

A thin boy sloped up the stairs, a little roll-up already propped in his mouth, turning his cheek to the curly-haired girl. 

‘Hey bro,’ she said, kissing him. 

The boy nodded to Sansa. ‘Later.’

‘See you,’ she said.

The girls walked out, hand in hand, and Sandor tried not to think about the two of them together, though distraction by any means necessary was pretty vital. The piercer pulled the door behind him without turning round and slouched after them.

It felt different without the noisy chaos that one girl and one squealing victim seemed to bring. Intimate. The music had stopped, too. Sansa didn’t say anything for ages, and nor did he. Just the buzz of the gun, short little bursts of it. Her hand was on his thigh. Red nails, thin silver rings on her fingers, angular shapes.

‘You ok?’ she said.

He found that he couldn’t say anything at all. Like his heart had got stuck in cement. Christ. Think of lesbians. On the other hand, don't. ‘What time were you supposed to close?’

‘Six.’

The clock on the wall, which had a Hindu-looking elephant on it, said 7.30pm.

‘You charging me extra?’

She didn’t take her eyes from his chest. ‘No.’ That cool, airy confidence was back again. ‘I just want to get it right. If you can take it.’ She lifted her wrist away as he took a big breath in, chest - his burning, raw chest - rising. 

‘Aye. Ok.’

***

‘It’s done.’

8.10pm. Four hours in total. Sansa’s back hurt, and her shoulders, but it was worth it. She’d do some yoga before she went to bed. Sometimes she treated herself to a massage, by a vicious old Chinese lady on Kingsland Road whose elbows were more painful than tattoo guns.

Sandor didn’t move for a moment, and then let out a huge sigh. The slightest judder in it. ‘Thank Christ. Bloody hell.’

She grinned at him. At least he was honest about it. ‘You did fine. You didn’t have a break or anything. I’ve seen a lot worse. Crying, howling. And that’s just the men.’ Arya had dined out on the story of that guy Janos running out screaming for weeks.

‘Well, I wasn’t far off it.’ A tiny shudder again as he rubbed his thumb in his other palm, and tucked his chin down, trying to see.

‘Hang on.’ She leaned back and grabbed some wipes, and removed the last smears of blood. Held up the mirror for him.

***

There it was. Right in the middle of his chest. Dark, angular lines on red skin, though that would settle, he bloody hoped. 

It had a straight line right down the middle. On one side, the angular planes of its face, a small, hard eye. On the other side, the eye had become a moon, and black tree-silhouettes spiked up and around it. 

It looked almost wolfish.

It was his. Him. And it was there forever.

***

Usually they were really happy, started with the effusive thanks if they were tipsy girls, or brusque, cheerful nods from the harder boys. But this guy, Sandor, just stared at it, his arms still by his side. Totally unreadable. 

‘Ok?’ she said, carefully. 

‘Aye.’ He seemed to mean it. ‘Thanks.’ He let out another jagged breath. 

It was rather sweet, how he was just about holding himself together. It didn’t just seem to be the pain, which she knew well enough herself, and the middle of the breastbone would have been worse than anything she’d had. She was sure that the tattoo really meant something to him. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

A slight frown, but a vulnerable one. ‘Don’t you want to get off?’

‘It’s fine. I live upstairs. Just making sure you’re ok and not going to crumble on the way home.’

He eyed her. The silver in his eyes was threaded with suspicion. Wariness. ‘Aye, ok. Thanks.’

***

It did still hurt to buggery, but not as much as the damned needle-torture. A taut, low pain.

Sansa had talked him through the aftercare – he’d have to ask a chemist for bloody _nappy rash_ cream, as if attempting to shave himself hadn’t been humiliating enough. She’d put cling film over it and masking tape, and he could feel it loosening under his t-shirt, which was back on, thank god. 

And now here she was, her back to him in the tiny box-kitchen space behind the curtain, putting teabags into mugs, and he was wondering how many others she made a cuppa for after hours. She was probably a saint. Did it for everyone. Of course she did. 

‘Milk?' Pale shoulders, tattooed arm. That hair, over her shoulder.

‘Aye. Just a wee bit.’

They stood there, hands round mugs, steam snaking up, neither of them talking. This girl had just spent four hours leaning on him, inflicting pain for sure, but – he already missed the feeling of her palm on his thigh. Elbow on his side. Completely not interested in the unholy mess of his face.

She didn’t seem to know what to say either, staring at her mug, glancing at him. 

There was the sound of the bell and her head jerked up.

‘Hello, hello?’ A man, loud.

‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘I should have locked it.’ She put her mug down. ‘We’re closed,’ she called. Sandor followed her out into the room. 

‘Indeed, indeed,’ said the man who'd just come in, and who looked like a bloody court jester. Disgusting old coat and a hat made by blind nursery school children. He was slurring even those simple bloody words as he pointed dramatically towards her. Pissed as a newt. ‘Greetings,’ he said, doing a sloppy bow. ‘Hello my lady, remember me? You said you’d give me a tattoo, I’ve been considering it very carefully and I know what I want.’ He was starting to unbuckle his belt. 

‘Oh my god, what are you doing?’ Sansa said, rushing towards him. ‘We are closed and you can’t afford it. I’ve told you before.’

‘Gratis,’ the man said, with a flourish of his hands, before shushing himself. ‘For free, my lovely lady, I know you said it and I know I did not dream it.’ He was trying to swipe to something on his phone and take down his trousers at the same time. ‘I’ve got it here, it’s just absolutely completely perfect. Yes. Three golden crowns, just below the -’

Sansa put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Don. You are totally not doing that in here,’ she said. ‘Out.’

‘My sweet lady -’ The man lurched at her, a hand wheeling round, and Sansa took a step back.

‘Right, that’s it,’ Sandor said, and picked the guy half-up by the shoulder of his coat. Christ, he stank. Piss and beer ten times over. ‘On your bike, pal. You’re freaking the lady out.’

The guy looked up at him with watery eyes, totally fucking guileless. ‘For shame, sir. I have come here in good faith. I' good faith.’ He hiccupped.

‘Aye, and you’ll leave in good bloody faith.’ The man was speaking like he was a medieval fucking peasant. ‘Go on, can’t you see you’re making a fool of yourself?’

The man blinked up at him, and again more slowly, breathing out a pissing beery breath, as if someone was reading him the end of a story. He held up a finger and then gave half a bow to Sansa again. ‘My apologies, my lady. I think I got the time wrong.’ Sandor walked him to the door, and he staggered off in one direction and then the other.

Sansa was gazing at him. ‘Thank you. He’s harmless, but – he’s a pain. I should have locked the door.’ She looked at him. ‘You’ve done that before.’

‘Aye, I’m a bouncer. Or I was.’

‘Yeah? When did you stop?’

‘Yesterday.’ A quick look, but she didn’t press further. God, he felt like he could tell her everything. His life story and then some. He followed her back into the kitchen. 

***

She’d never made tea for anyone this late. Not on her own. Brienne was usually last out, and if Sansa carried on past closing hours, one of them always stayed with her. 

It felt different now that he was towering over her in this tiny kitchen rather than her in control, tattoo gun in hand. But it had been very sweet, him seeing Don out. She’d have dealt with him fine – he really was a harmless, and partly homeless, guy – but it was nice to have some support. He’d been totally unfussy about it.

A buzz from the phone in Sandor’s jeans pocket. He shifted against the kitchen cupboard. It had buzzed several times during the session. 

‘You know you’re free to get that now,’ she said.

‘Aye.’ He didn’t move. 

Maybe it was a girlfriend. A wife. He didn’t seem like he had a wife. He hadn’t mentioned one, anyway. She couldn’t work him out. 

He drained his mug. ‘Right,’ he said, fishing out his wallet rather than his phone. ‘Better tell me the damage.’

‘I’ll take off a tenner for the free doorman work,’ she said. 

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, handing her his card, and watching her put it in the machine. ‘It’s my pleasure.’ Spoken a bit more quietly, and in a way that made a little dull pain in the well of her throat, as if someone was pressing a finger there.

They both stared at the card machine. ‘Maybe we should hire a bouncer,’ she said, and looked up at him. ‘Seeing as you’re out of work.’

There seemed to be longer pauses between everything they said. As if it would make time slow a little bit.

‘Get many layabouts wanting free tattoos on their arses?’ he said, taking the card back.

‘Just Don really,’ she said.

The flash of silver in the cementy grey of his eyes. A tiny breath through his nose. 'Aye, well, I gave that stuff up for a reason.' 

_What reason_? she thought. 

‘I’ll be off, then,' he said.

She looked at him. There wasn’t any reason for him to stay. Nodded.

‘You have to tell me,’ she said, walking him to the door and nodding at his chest. ‘Why you got this. It’s the rule. As your tattooist.’

He raised his eyebrows, faintly suspicious. ‘Is it?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I’m interested, though. Mostly I tattoo roses and stars and hearts. It’s nice to do something different.’

A small breath in his throat as the air stilled. He was staring at the wall above her head, frowning. 

‘Come out for a drink with me and I’ll tell you,’ he said, and looked surprised at his own words. 

***

Everything stopped. The heat of his heart underneath the heat of the pain in his chest. Christ.

She was flirting, then. She’d definitely been flirting. Hadn’t she?

Sansa took a small breath as if she was going to say something and instead smiled, a slow, faintly incredulous one, and for a second he thought, aye, well, that wasn’t so hard, was it? And then her smile drew back on it itself. Her eyes flickered to the ceiling and she looked almost scared for a moment. Guilty.

‘I don’t – um,’ she said. ‘I don’t do that.’

‘Do what?’ The mood was already changing. Jesus. What had he been thinking. 

She swallowed, a lump moving in that pale throat. ‘Go out with guys.’ 

‘Ok.’ Great. She was like her sister, then. Two lesbian sisters. Store it for later. ‘My mistake.’ He could picture the rest of his night already, a bottle of whisky on his knee, TV with the sound muted, playing her rejection over and over in his head. It was just best never to ask. For fuck’s sake. 

She was gazing at him. ‘No. Not like that. Um.’ Her words had gone wispy, thin as smoke.

‘It’s fine. I get it. Don’t worry about it. Thanks for the – work.’ He turned to the door.

‘No.’ She put a hand on his arm, for about a millisecond. ‘You’re – nice. Just.’ She looked down at her phone in her other hand. 

She seemed to want to say yes. Or at least half-say yes. ‘Boyfriend?’ he asked, a ludicrously searching word, a word that dickheads with shite chat-up lines used.

‘No. No.’ She stared at the floor. ‘It’s really nice that you asked. Maybe -’ she didn’t finish the sentence, shaking her head and standing taller, as she had when he’d first walked in here. ‘Let me know if the tattoo’s ok. Goodnight.’

He stood on the other side of the door as she shut it, that metallic trickle of the bell, and watched as she looked at him for a moment longer, a tiny smile appearing at the corner of her mouth again before she drew the blinds down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	3. Chapter 3

‘And then the wave turned me over and I swallowed half the bloody sea.’ Beric, a regular customer, was currently lying on his stomach on the seat, his head resting on his arms.

‘And yet here you are,’ Sansa said, leaning over him.

‘Here I am. Again.’

Sansa was working on his back piece, which Brienne had first started years ago. Every time Beric had a near-death experience – although he called each of them a ‘death experience’ – he’d come in for another image of Death and the afterlife to add to his collection. The Grim Reaper, Thanatos, the headless dullahan of Ireland. Sansa was doing a version of St Michael up on his shoulder blade, adding shading to the rays of light around his head. Beric had explained that he was the archangel that carried souls up to heaven, ‘not that he’s got mine yet.’ His latest escapade had involved attempting to conquer a massive Pacific wave somewhere south of San Francisco.

‘Well, you’re charmed,’ she said. She liked Beric. He had a warm, gritty storytelling voice and nothing seemed to faze him, least of all the tattoo gun digging into his flesh.

Beric craned round. ‘Charm _ing_ , I hope.’

‘Oh, that too, obviously.’ She grinned, not taking her eyes off her work. Even his flirting seemed utterly harmless.

Sansa picked up another wipe. She couldn’t help being reminded of another very large guy who’d been in two days ago. The silver and the grey, and all the secrets in him. There was something very dark in that dog design of his.

But not just darkness. He’d asked her out. Guys had asked her out before here, but always very half-heartedly during tattooing, caution thrown to the wind, slight hysteria setting in. This had felt different. Like it really meant something. And she’d closed herself up, wanted to run away, essentially shut the door in his face. She was never going to get better.

‘Well, I still want to go surfing,’ said Arya, eavesdropping next to them, and working on her own client, a cute little origami rabbit for a brown-haired guy with cheeks that went redder every time she put her gun on him. ‘Sign me the fuck up. I’ll smack those waves upside the head.’

Beric gave a low chuckle. ‘I’m sure you would, my dear.’

The bell went.

‘Shit, you’re keen,’ said Arya to whoever had just come in. ‘Let that one go down first, mate.’

Sansa glanced up to find Sandor there, his hands in his pockets.

***

He stood in the middle of the room, like a total fucking dickhead.

Sandor had thought about her for the last 70 hours. It was like she’d burned herself into his flesh, not just the tattoo, which was starting to scab. The sweet raw throb in his chest had ebbed away, and he didn’t want it to. That brightness she’d had at the beginning, and the darker girl underneath, coming out slowly as the hours had gone on and the ink gone in. The white and the red.

She had left that little thread dangling for him – _let me know how the tattoo is_ – seven words that rattling round in his head like an old tube carriage. And after 69 hours he’d thought, fuck it, and got on the Central Line.

Sansa had stopped tattooing the guy she was with, an expression on her face like an injured bird trying to take flight. ‘Hello,’ she said.

She was wearing a white t-shirt with a black and white photo of a cityscape on it – New York, maybe – and black necklaces. Jeans that looked paint-spattered. And he could see the red nail polish from here.

‘Hello,’ he said back, like an idiot.

She was seated next to a big ginger fucker, her hand on his shoulder blade, a stark reminder of what she did every damned day. His heart turned to lead. Who the fuck was he kidding, coming back here?

‘Is everything ok with your tattoo?’ she said, not giving any clue that he’d asked her out. Perhaps she’d forgotten. Was trying to forget.

‘Aye.’ Christ, find some bloody excuse for being here. ‘Well, I’m not sure – it’s quite flaky. Itchy.’

Her pint-sized sister was watching him, eyes black with suspicion. He hadn’t recognized her at first, what with her hair now being bright blonde.

A little line appeared between Sansa’s eyebrows, before she glanced up at the African mask head clock up on the ceiling. ‘If you come back in about an hour and half, I can have a proper look.’

Well, she didn’t say fuck the fuck off. Yet. He nodded, and got himself the hell out of there.

***

Sansa spent the next ninety minutes trying to concentrate on St. Michael, and murmuring responses to Beric’s stories of camping out on America’s West Coast and fighting with elephant seals, all the while watching the clock and wondering what Sandor was doing. Last time he’d smelt of coffee. Coffee and mints.

Arya was seeing off her boy. ‘Later ‘gater. Come see me again if you want any more animals. I got quite into that one. Made a real paper one to test it out and everything.’ She made a clicking noise with her tongue and fired an imaginary pistol at him.

The boy blushed as he said goodbye.

‘Actually quite cute,’ Arya said, shutting the door behind him.

‘I thought you liked girls,’ said Sansa, who was getting cling film for Beric’s back.

‘I do,’ said Arya. ‘Mostly.’

‘Meera will get her rollergirl friends to beat you up.’

‘She might like him too,’ Arya said, with a shit-eating and rather dirty grin. She had always been the rebel, back at home, on the other side of their lives. ‘Anyway, I’m going to roller derby next month. I’ll win them over.’ Another flash of teeth. ‘Speaking of cute,’ she said, looking round, ‘here comes the opposite.’ She opened the door.

Sandor filled the room. He was at least two inches taller than Beric, who was just putting his shirt back on.

‘Hey,’ she said to him, wishing her palms hadn’t gone sweaty, thanking the lord she wasn’t tattooing Beric any longer, her gun slipping.

Sandor nodded at her.

‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ said Beric, in his easy way.

‘Aye,’ he said, and there was the slightest suspicion in his voice. ‘She is.’

‘See you, Beric,’ said Sansa.

‘Bye, sweetheart.’ He leant down and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Until the next one.’

‘I hope there isn’t one,’ she said. One of these days she’d hear from Brienne that Beric had died abseiling in the Grand Canyon or swimming with sharks.

‘There always is,’ he said, winking.

Sansa turned to Sandor, who was standing stiffly in the middle of the room, pretending to look at the display boards. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look, then.’

‘Yeah,’ said the short-arse, locking the door behind Beric. ‘I wanna see San-San’s handiwork.’

***

Well, this hadn’t been the plan.

It would have been bloody weird enough taking his top off again here in front of Sansa, let alone with her scrawny little sister screwing her nose up at him. The girl had a list of words all along the outside of one arm, and ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ on her knuckles. A broken sword on the inside of her forearm.

The few pissed girls that ended up back at his would prod at him, screech, ‘you’re so _huge_ ,’ at him, giggle theatrically as if someone else was in the room watching them. Sansa took a step up and just gazed at him, rather seriously. Her closeness was enough to make him work like hell at not becoming hard. He could feel her breath on his skin, just as before.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, stepping back. ‘It’ll be uncomfortable for a bit, especially with the hair coming back through, but you’ll be grand. It’s as it should be.’

‘Nice one, sis,’ said her sister, who’d come closer to him, still having to crane upwards. She was wearing a t-shirt that said _GIRLS BITE BACK_. ‘That is sick. Dark as fuck.’ She scrutinised him. ‘You should get more, mate. Make a pack.’

‘One’ll do for now,’ he said.

The girl gave a short, sharp, uninterested nod and wandered to her chair, gathering up bottles.

He put his t-shirt back over his head, nurse’s examination over, and found Sansa still watching him. Thoughtful. Careful.

‘Um.’ She looked at the wall of tattoo design displays, and back at him. Blue eyes the colour of those fat cartoon birds on the display. ‘Drink?’

The word was so tiny and unassuming that for a second he thought he might have misheard her. ‘Aye, alright,’ he said, before she could change her mind.

The little sister had stopped clearing up and was watching them. ‘Yeah?’ she said, and he thought, well thanks a fucking lot. Bugger off, pipsqueak.

There was an odd atmosphere in the room. Sansa was giving her sister a nod.

‘Want me to come?’ the girl said. What was she, her fucking bouncer?

‘It’s ok,’ Sansa said, but as if the little one was the senior sibling, or even a bloody parent. Surely she was older – he’d hoped decently into her twenties, for this not to be any less ridiculous than it already was.

The sister was looking at him again. ‘Text me,’ she said to Sansa, but her eyes on him. Two broken swords.

***

Fine. She could do this. It was just a drink.

They went round the corner to Prague Bar, where she and Arya sometimes came after work, and where Jojen could often be found chatting to the bartenders, some of whom he had pierced – in way or the other, as Arya had said once before, sniggering. He was there in the corner today, elbow on the bar, holding his drink up to them. There were newspapers and band posters pasted onto the exposed brick walls, and cocktail menus glued around wine bottles.

Sandor ordered a bottle of German beer and raised his eyebrows when she asked for a Coke.

‘I don’t drink,’ she said. ‘I mean, not alcohol.’

‘OK,’ he said, looking a little nonplussed but at least not doing what other people tended to, asking why the hell she didn’t drink as if she had a rare disease. She never told them the truth.

They sat down on the blood-red leather couch at the front, facing the window. Rain streaking down and blurring the traffic lights on the crossroads. She found the corner of the sofa, not too near him, taking a long gulp of her drink and trying to get her courage up. The tables were turned now, and she wasn’t in charge anymore.

‘You got good security back there,’ Sandor said. ‘A sister as a bodyguard.’

She smiled at him. ‘She’s protective.’

He raised his eyebrows again and took a sip of his beer, shifting as his phone buzzed. A grumble came from deep in his throat, like tectonic plates scratching together, and he dug a hand into his pocket. ‘Thought I’d turned this bastard onto silent.’

‘You don’t like your phone much, do you?’ He looked at her. ‘You kept ignoring it the other day, too.’

He scratched his temple, and looked at the street. ‘No one I want to hear from calls me on it.’ It buzzed again and several curses came gently out of him as he jabbed at it.

‘Are you getting stalked or something?’

‘No. Just –’ he glanced outside, a man tugging along a big Dalmatian dog and two Japanese girls leaning down and cooing over it. ‘Hassled. Work.’ He glanced at her, and she saw that vulnerability again, and the way he seemed to be assessing her carefully. Assessing what he could say. ‘Ex-work.’

‘What happened?’ she said, gently.

‘I just had enough.’ Another grumbly sigh, low down in his chest. As if the dog she had tattooed on him had a voice.

‘So you jacked it in?’

‘Punched the boss’s lights out, jacked it in.’ He swigged his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Aye.’

***

He told her about the club, a massive one that had its heyday in the ‘90s, next to Smithfield. How he’d been working there under the old boss, who was a soft, useless bastard but alright, before he died and his great golden twat of a son took over. The boy lived in an apartment next door that probably cost several million quid, turned up to the office when he could be arsed, and the money started to drain away from the club and into various shadowy ventures. Sandor was expected to turn a blind eye, along with the other security.

All sorts of shady fucking bastards started turning up, and he knew all sorts of shady fucking deals were being done, usually with Joff Baratheon snorting coke off some woman’s arse in the back room. Drugs first, coppers bought off, women being smuggled in from fuck knows where. It was getting really bloody unsavoury, and more cold weekends of standing outside saying no to ketamine-blasted wankers, the buses streaking past, was getting boring.

His pay started dwindling, less nights, the money being siphoned off to whatever Joff’s latest scams were. The last straw was the boy telling him that guns were going to be coming in, and calling him ‘Dog’ when he said he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Sandor hauled him up by his shirt collar, slammed him against a wall, and whacked him. The boy fell down like a rag doll.

In the bar - which he couldn’t help but notice was red and white like her - Sansa leant forward. ‘So is it him that’s messaging you?’ She seemed to be loosening a bit, having started off by practically huddling in one corner of the sofa. Trust his sob stories to do that and not some slick lines about how she looked, which was really fucking beautiful.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Him and one of his drones. Threatening GBH charges, though all he wants to know really is that I’m not going to spill all his criminal bullshit to the police.’ He sighed and put an arm on the back of the sofa, not too near her. Not yet. ‘Fuck it. I can’t be doing with it.’

‘So – what will you do now?’ Her voice became softer.

‘I don’t know yet.’ That was the truth. He’d heard about his brother dying, he’d hit Joff Baratheon, he’d got a tattoo. Talk about a midlife fucking crisis. ‘We’ll see.’

There was shouting at the bar. It was getting a bit noisy in here. People coming in after work, though work for most of these people meant staring at a laptop all day long making graphic design YouTube DJ start-ups, or whatever they all did round here.

Sandor put a hand at the top of his chest, near the place it itched the most.

‘No scratching,’ she said, a tiny bit of schoolma’am in there. Sexy as fuck.

‘Aye, sorry,’ he said, and put his palm up at her.

Another smile. She kept veering between dead shy and cautious – really, what the fuck was that about with her sister back there? – and the tall, confident girl armed with a tattoo gun. ‘How did you know about our place?’ she said.

‘My mate told me. Lass called Osha, don’t know if you’ve done anything for her.’ He described her – the dreadlocks, penchant for wearing loads of wooden skulls of dead animals round her neck, mouth like a drunken sailor.

Sansa’s face brightened. ‘Oh, I know her. I haven’t tattooed her, but she’s been in a few times. She’s cool.’

‘Aye, she’s ok. She liked you lot. Well, she said the lassies were cute.’ Jesus. He’d said that without even thinking.

Sansa bit her lip and looked at her knees and Christ, he wanted to put his arm round her. ‘And what do you think?’ she said, quietly, a little nick of a glance up at him.

‘Aye. I’d agree with that,’ he said, and swallowed the lump that felt like a fucking apple in his throat.

She smiled at her knees again.

More noise around them, and now some hipster twat was sitting on the arm of his chair, talking to their mates, crowding them in.

‘Do you – want to go on somewhere else?’ he said. He could ask. She’d asked him first, this time.

Sansa gazed at him, and he wondered what thoughts were swimming away behind those blue eyes. She nodded.

***

‘This isn’t where I’d expect you to take me,’ Sandor said, leaning on the bar.

They had walked down Brick Lane, past all the late-night pop-up shops that were still open, along the cobbled streets and the restaurants. A DJ was blasting pretty edgy-sounding techno under the Overground bridge, and Sandor had surprised her with his knowledge of DJs and dance music. But then he had worked in a superclub for years. ‘My ears are fucked,’ he’d said, as they passed the DJ. ‘They’re in an old-aged people’s home waiting for me.’

Well, she could surprise him, too. She loved this pub. The Pride of Spitalfields was a classic East End boozer, with a landlady who spoke like she’d swallowed scouring pads, and a mixed crowd of hardened locals who were into the boxing and worked in the markets, and artier people. The carpet was sticky with old beer underfoot, and loads of pictures of the historic East End hung on the walls, back when every man wore a flat cap and the Jewish Huguenots still sold cloth and silk.

‘Where did you expect?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. A place with less old men.’

She got the impression Sandor been hoping for somewhere quieter, but it was Friday night. He had to lean down to hear her order, and she’d felt the heat of him, the touch of his shoulder on hers.

They found a couple of stools by the fire, Sandor dwarfing his seat. ‘No laughing,’ he said, and she laughed anyway, and god, it felt good to be made to laugh by a man. They clinked glasses, and talked about normal things – East London, the traffic, telly. She found herself telling him about her studies, and how she would cram in her reading between tattooing sessions. Business Studies, Health and Social Care, and Art History.

‘A degree?’ he said.

‘No.’ She knew she was flushing, and not just from the warmth of the fire. ‘Just BTECs and an A-Level. At a college.’ It was three evenings a week, and it wasn’t as awful as she’d originally thought it might be, having imagined being surrounded by 16 year-olds. The evening classes were populated by all sorts, plenty of adults trying to better their lives, from a couple of mums whose kids were now in school to immigrants needing to get British qualifications. She glanced up at him. ‘I flunked everything the first time.’

He looked surprised, but just nodded. She liked that about him. No prying, just absorbing what she told him. It made her want to tell him more.

‘I didn’t have such a good time when I was younger,’ she said.

‘You and me both,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Aye.’ He gazed at her, his pint glass on his knee. Waiting.

‘My parents died. And my brother. A burglary that went wrong.’ When she said it like that, it sounded so straightforward. The opposite of the hell it was, on a sleepover at her friend’s house aged fifteen, Jeyne’s mum coming into the bedroom with a phone in her hand and a grave, shocked expression on her face.

There were flames in his eyes from the fire. ‘I’m sorry.’ As simple as that. No histronics, hands over mouths, pretend tears in eyes.

She told him a bit, staring into the fire. How Arya had also been out, having gone out of the window to a gig with her friend. How two men had come in to steal laptops and jewellery and had ended up putting knives in her mum, dad and Robb, who’d spent almost a week struggling for his life in hospital before he died. The Frey brothers had been sent down for it, but several life sentences were not enough. Would never be enough.

‘Arya and me went to live with my aunt in Norwich,’ she said. ‘It was ok for a bit, but my aunt was a bit crazy. Sent us all a bit crazy.’ She started to think about what followed, and felt smoky tears begin to come. She put a knuckle up in the corner of one eye.

Sandor had been watching her, his pint glass cradled in both hands. Letting her talk. He leant forward, so that his cheek was very near hers, the scars close. ‘Want to get some air?’ His voice was so low, and dark as ash. A voice she wanted to hide in.

‘Yeah,’ she said, the word scratched.

***

Christ. No wonder there was sadness in her. He’d had it pretty bad, but this was something else. Something you read about in the papers, happening to people you didn’t know.

They were walking north up Brick Lane again, past a few curry houses, ignoring the waiters touting for business, though in truth he could bloody murder a biryani right now. Sansa was hugging her coat around her, not saying much, lost in her thoughts.

‘Special Friday night deal,’ said another Bangladeshi guy in a white shirt with a beaming smile.

They stepped round him, but Sansa stopped suddenly, looking up at him. A blink, as if sending those memories just a little further away. ‘Are you hungry?’ she said, and he couldn’t help being touched that she’d notice, after telling him all that.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I could eat.’

‘Want to know my favourite food?’ she said, swallowing, and there was an attempt at a smile.

‘Lead the way,’ he said.

She didn’t say anything else, her arms wrapped round herself again, wrapped up in her grief, he supposed. But she hadn’t gone yet.

She didn’t take him to an ice cream place, or a French restaurant, or a curry place with half price everything. Instead, they went almost to the end of the street, past all the tourist kids and clubbers to a brightly-lit shop with a long queue snaking out of it.

‘This place is the best,’ Sansa said, still a bit gravely, joining the end the queue.

The shop, once they got into it, was humid with students and tourists and the smell of sweet dough. Two large, white-haired Jewish ladies were briskly wrapping up bagels and doughnuts in paper bags, demanding next orders as they went. They seemed to know Sansa, greeting her with only a little more kindness than all the others.

Afterwards, they stood on the kerb, gnawing on the bagels Sansa had chosen for them both. She’d insisted on paying, though it only cost about four quid. A girl after his own heart.

‘What do you think?’ she said. The drizzle had made some strands of her hair rise up, as if they were trying to get to a fire somewhere.

He’d already made swift work of most of his salt beef bagel. ‘Bloody great,’ he said, through a mouthful.

‘Try this one too.’ She held up her own salmon and cream cheese one, and their hands touched as he took a bite, nodding his approval.

He would eat anything out of her hands, he thought, watching her finish the rest of her bagel off in a way that was somehow both delicate and totally indelicate, and trying to imagine what it must have been like to hear that your folks and your brother had been murdered, all at aged fifteen. And no wonder her little sister was as hardened as she seemed to be.

Her eyes kept darting down to his beard. ‘You’ve got mustard on you,’ she said.

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, and put the heel of his hand up to wipe the side.

She smiled, a bloody cute little one, and shook her head. ‘Not there.’ And she put her thumb up, two hard little strokes on his chin, before she licked it off, nursemaid and sex-kitten in one fell swoop.

He stared at her. He could kiss her, his mouth stinging with hot mustard.

‘Minicab?’ said the fourth man in a row who was hovering outside the bagel shop.

‘Fuck off,’ he said, having been a bit more polite to the other three.

Sansa grinned at him. ‘That’s not very nice,’ before shivering.

‘ _I’m_ not very nice,’ he said, as the rain started to come down properly again.

‘Yes you are,’ she said, more quietly, glancing up at him before looking at the kerb again.

Two lads with their arms round each other and pint glasses in their hands staggered past, yelling.

‘Do you need to get back?’ he said, wondering how long he could spin it out for. He’d got this far. Two beers and three generous slices of salty beef and fat gherkins.

A little line appeared in her cheek along with the small smile. ‘We haven’t finished the tour,’ she said, and took his arm.

***

Final place. She would have to get going after this – Arya kept texting her to check she was ok.

The Hookah Lounge was just a bit south of the Beigel Bake, and always quieter, even at weekends. There were a few tourists smoking the hookah pipes, smells of soapy cherry and pine filling the place up. They sat at one of the little gold-tray tables, Sandor again making everything look twice as small. Mismatched chairs and lamps were scattered around them, and Turkish music rattled tinnily from the speakers.

She hadn’t talked about her parents for a long time. Brienne knew everything, as did the counsellors, but hardly anyone else. It was too hard to begin, usually, but there was something about Sandor that made her open up. She imagined her ribcage peeling back, her bloody heart floating out.

It had been easy, telling him, and easy spending time with him. He was a bit grouchy, but he listened well, and didn’t sink pint after pint. Right now, he was putting a fourth baklava into his mouth in one go, and washing it down with more cardamom coffee.

She wrapped her hands round her apple tea. ‘So you didn’t know this place either?’

He shook his head. ‘Never come round here so much.’ He licked his fingers, and just for a moment, she thought about doing it for him, her tongue around his thumb. He’d looked warily astonished when she’d got the mustard off his beard, which was about as daring as she’d been in three years, and he hadn’t moved a millimetre.

‘Well, I’m glad to give you the tour,’ she said.

‘I’m glad to have it.’ He didn’t smile back, just a frank, dark gaze that made her shiver.

‘So,’ she said, and raised an eyebrow. Taking back control. She could do it.

‘So,’ he said back.

‘Your tattoo. You said you’d tell me if I came out for a drink with you.’

‘Oh, so that’s what this has been about then? he said, leaning over to put his coffee down. ‘You’re just trying to pump me for information?’

She smiled and shook her head. ‘I just – I want to know more about you. That’s all.’

He narrowed his eyes at her, but the amusement in them dissolved slowly. That thoughtful assessment of her again. And he told her.

***

In Scotland, back in his childhood, Gregor bought a dog. Their da was furious, said it couldn’t stay, it wasn’t the right breed, nothing like. But it stayed, because Gregor always got his way.

This one was different. Gregor talked to it, quietly, in his ear, and always had food in his hand – but Sandor noticed that he didn’t always feed him, holding it near his nose before snatching it away. Or holding it above the dog’s head so that he would strain and tremble, muscles stiff as knives under the skin.

The dog was supposed to stay outside in its own pen, but after weeks of the others howling, his da finally yelled at Gregor to just bloody bring it inside, then, just to get a night’s peace. It would lift its head up when Sandor walked past, a deep rumble in its belly.

Sandor was thirteen when it happened. Gregor had somehow convinced another girl, aged somewhere between the two of them, to spend time with him. She came to visit one day when he wasn’t there, so Sandor kept her company. He hadn’t done anything. Just fetched her a drink, sneaked a bit of his da’s vodka into it as she’d asked, sat with her on the wall, looking at the trees in the valley below them turn purple as the sun went down. Found Gregor behind them, watching.

Sandor had waited that night for the usual – a sock with a stone in it, his knuckles numbed for weeks, and it hadn’t come. Just Gregor, whispering to his dog, holding something scrunched in his hand that he couldn’t quite see, and teasing him with food.

‘It’s cold out, bro,’ he’d said, two days later, and Sandor had looked at his brother’s woolly hat that he held out. ‘Best keep your head warm, eh?’ Maybe he had grown out of it, Sandor had thought, the bullying. Maybe this girl had made him a bit softer. He had thought on this as he had walked out towards the hill with his CD Walkman headphones on, music shouting into his ears so that he did not hear the mastiff tearing up behind him, only felt a thump on his back, and the hot stun of breath and teeth, and the sound of his own screaming.

In the Turkish place, Sansa was staring at him, her mouth open. Horror in her eyes.

‘Didn’t like dogs much for a while after that,’ he said. Understatement. He couldn’t work with the dogs anymore. He gave the barns a wide berth, and had to sleep with earplugs to block out the barking. For years, down here in London, he had to cross the road if there was a dog at a gate.

‘That’s – that’s awful. How could – how could he –’

Sandor stared at his drink. Here we go. The sympathy vote. Which was why he never told anyone about it.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘What did your dad do?’

‘Made Gregor shoot the dog himself. But he didn’t report it. If people had known there’d been a banned dog on site, that’d been the end of the business. He told the hospital I’d had an accident with some tools.’

She was staring at the table, long audible outbreaths, taking it all in. He hadn’t told anyone this in years. Osha was probably the last to hear of it all, and she just passed him more whisky and told him to knock it back.

‘The tattoo isn’t his dog, not exactly,’ he said. 'It’s our dogs, the ones we trained up. It’s all dogs. It’s about me. Taking it back. I was fucking scared of dogs for years.’

‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ she said.

He looked up, surprised. She had taken a breath in straight after saying that, put her thumb knuckle in her mouth.

‘Aye,’ he said, and almost smiled. ‘Me too.’

‘How did you end up down here?’

‘My da died. I followed my brother.’ So the business had ended anyway, and he’d come to London because his brother had, and because there was nowhere else to go. ‘I know it seems stupid that I’d go anywhere near him after that, but I didn’t have much choice.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not always easy. To get away from those who have hurt you.’ He watched her gaze drift to the wall, almost guiltily. She seemed not just to be talking about Gregor. That black choker round her neck made it longer, more pale. He wanted to run the back of a finger along it.

‘Come home with me,’ he said. Someone else’s words, coming out of his gob. He watched them floating around in front of them, impossible to take back. Fuck.

She did exactly what she did last time, in the tattoo shop. A breath in, a sentence that didn’t start. A slight smile not quite turning into one. She looked at the table.

‘Ok,’ she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>     
> [Here is a lovely article on the institution that is the Brick Lane Beigel Bake!](http://spitalfieldslife.com/2009/12/11/mr-sammys-beigel-shop/)
> 
> NB College means education for 16-18 year-olds in the UK. We say ‘university’ for all degree-level stuff.
> 
> PS I decided to only give Sansa and Arya the one sibling, for convenience. Killing off three boys as well as the parents was too much for me!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible trigger warnings necessary here for non-con stuff. Nothing graphic.

_Come home with me_. The first time he’d ever said it to anyone, the first time it’d not been some girl slurring it vaguely in his direction. And Sansa was totally fucking sober, eerily so, sitting next to him in the back of the cab, holding onto her elbows.

His flat was at the arse end of Leytonstone, which was saying something, past the floodlit football fields, teenage girls playing a late-night match in the rain. The cab stopped outside the halal shop, its security light blinking. Aye, he probably should have warned her that his place wasn’t exactly the fucking Ritz.

Sansa got out of the car and stood looking at the row of shops, just the newsagents open now, crates of fruit being taken inside. 

‘It’s just round the back,’ he said.

She glanced at her phone again, something she’d been doing on most of the journey. 

‘You ok?’ he said.

She put it away in her little canvas shoulder bag, nodded. Didn’t seem quite ok.

If he’d remembered what a state his flat was in, he might have thought twice about inviting her back. He’d left his laundry in the living room, and two or three nights of washing up languished in the kitchen sink. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Give me two minutes.’

Three minutes of swiping everything up and shoving it in the airing cupboard or under the bed and at least getting stuff soaked in the sink, and he found her in the living room, standing looking at his two rows of books and DVDs. That long neck craned, her hair slipping down her shoulder.

Bloody hell, he was as nervous as a boy. But, he saw as she turned round, not as nervous as she seemed to have become, holding onto an elbow as if it was broken, looking at him like he might eat her.

‘Didn’t pay those elves enough last time,’ he said, a pretty tortuous attempt at a joke. 

‘You should see our room.’ She obviously spotted his heart-attack look at the word _our_ , his visions of some youthful hipster boyfriend, tattooed up to the eyeballs. ‘I share with Arya.’

Like kids, he thought, wondering at the pair of them again. Hadn’t she said she was twenty-three?

It had felt easier outside, in the rain-soaked streets, or surrounded by shouting students and tourists. Now the light seemed too bloody bright, and he cursed not having a lamp for mood lighting or whatever the fuck you called it. It’d always been back to the girl’s house before, her shushing him because of flatmates, falling about over the recycling that had been left in the hallway. 

‘Do you want a coffee?’ That was what you said, when you had a girl back to yours, which had happened exactly never.

‘Do you have any herbal teas?’

He would have laughed at anyone else, but then this was the man who’d found himself downing cardamom coffee an hour ago. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’m ok, then.’ She gazed at the sofa for a moment as if it might have been an oracle, before sitting down on it, curling one leg up.

He sat down next to her. 

‘How long have you lived here?’ she said, looking round again. 

At least she wasn’t going to spin a lie about it being nice. Because it wasn’t. ‘Four years,’ he said, rubbing his temple with a finger. ‘Four years too many.’

She put her hands in her lap. ‘Where would you live if you could live anywhere?’

‘Scotland, I guess. You?’

‘I don’t know.’ She frowned at her hands for ages before looking up, a face as blank as a fresh sheet of paper. ‘I’ve no idea.’

***

She thought it would be ok. That it was time to move on, and that she would do it by pressing her foot firmly down on the accelerator. Now she felt a little strange. Trapped. It wasn’t Sandor’s fault. He wasn’t doing a thing wrong. 

She had texted Arya and got a stream of messages back, demanding and incredulous. Had sent her a pin of where she was on Google Maps. Finally put her phone on silent.

There was a muted dog-growl from Sandor’s stomach and he shifted, his t-shirt rising just a little. A glimpse of dark hair, a sliver of skin. ‘Don’t know how I’m still hungry,’ he said, glancing at her from under those thick eyebrows.

‘You’re a growing lad,’ she said, as he unselfconsciously pulled his t-shirt down again.

She liked how his mouth twisted up when he did that quiet laugh through his nose. ‘I’d better not bloody grow any more.’

They traded small, slow smiles. Every time she glanced down – the floor, the sofa, her hands – she knew he was still looking at her. The warmth of a woodburner on her skin.

‘So –’ he scratched the back of his head and thumped his arm down again. ‘Been out with many clients, then?’

She shook her head. ‘You’re the first.’ She made herself look up at him again, feeling her own pulse throb, heavily.

The air thickened. There was the tiny, repetitive click of a radiator somewhere. 

Sandor seemed to be about to say something, but instead he shifted and, with the hand that was on the back of the sofa, gently folded his fingers in her hair. ‘Christ, Sansa. You’re – you’re very pretty.’

She stayed very still. Her heart was like paper in the wind. ‘And you’re handsome.’

His fingers slowed a little. ‘Am I now.’ He sounded amused, and utterly disbelieving.

‘Yes,’ she said, her sureness making her sit up straighter. She saw all sorts of men in the shop, and he was the first who had actually made her feel something new. 

The backs of two of his fingers moved along her cheek, her jawline. A thumb along her lower lip. He moved again, his knee against the inside of hers, his hand on her other knee. 

She looked up at his silver-dark eyes.

She could do this.

***

He kissed her. She was dead still, apart from her mouth, only the slightest leaning forward, sitting there with one leg curled up like a cat and her back straight as if she was doing some yoga move. She didn’t put her hands on him. It was careful. Quiet. 

He kept going, one, then another, each kiss the answer to the last. Her mouth opening a bit, and tiny breaths as punctuation. He’d never known it so quiet outside on the street. Not a whisper.

Christ, her skin was cool, like she’d popped into the fridge for a few minutes. Tiny goosebumps peppering her forearms. He ran his hands down past her elbows, the bones of her wrists, surprised at how easy it was. He seemed to know how to touch her without feeling like a dickhead. 

He put one hand under her knee, so that she unhooked her leg around him, a heel near the small of his back. The sounds of her breath had stopped. Slowly, he grasped her knee so that he pulled her down underneath him a bit, leant on one elbow and put his other hand on her waist, coming in for another kiss.

There was a sudden sound in her throat, tight and high, and her hands were on his chest, her heel on his thigh, pushing him away, hard. What the fuck? Sansa sat up, sliding away from underneath him to the corner of the sofa, almost scrambling, as if she was trying to escape from a tiger or a black mamba.

‘I can’t,’ she said, and her voice was something new, taut and tearful. ‘I’m sorry.’

He sat back on his knees and stared at her as she drew her knees up, becoming small. The edges of her eyes glistened. ‘Are you frightened of me?’ It would hardly be a first. It happened, sometimes, the Saturday night girl freaking out and making excuses, and he was never too sad to fuck off home. But he’d thought she was different. She’d been right there, hand on his chest, marking him for life. And this evening, the ease of it. He’d thought – 

She shook her head. ‘No. Not of you.’ The words were grainy, serrated. ‘Just –’

He watched her eyes grow big, dark. Full of secrets he hadn’t quite realised. More to tell, more than just her family being obliterated. ‘Did someone hurt you?’

‘No. Yes.’ She looked at him. ‘Yes.’

***

The only people that knew were Brienne and Arya. No one else. 

‘If I tell you, you’ll think less of me,’ Sansa said. She was already shaking, the little uncontrollable, arctic tremors that would spread from her stomach to the tips of her fingers, her toes.

Sandor was still, his arm on the back of the sofa. He hadn’t shouted or got upset at her suddenly, violently pushing him away, just carefully sat back down, a little apart from her. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said.

Each breath she took in was like a shot of vodka, icy and sharp. She shook her head and looked at her palms. ‘I – I had a bad time.’

He didn’t say anything, and she knew he’d wait as long as she needed. She knew she had to tell him properly, from the beginning.

It took her another half a minute to look up at him. ‘After messing up at college, I just – went off the rails a bit.’ She chewed on the inside of her lip. ‘I left my aunt’s, went to London, stayed on a friend of a friend’s floor. And then another floor. And another. I just moved around a lot for a year, did shitty temp work. Got wasted. A lot. All sorts.’ Too many friends with connections, too many friends who thought it would help. She could picture all the carpets of the living rooms she stayed in, all the little box rooms with net curtains falling down.

‘Then I got a job in a bar in West London, and a guy –’ she had trained herself not to think of him, and yet it took only an instant for him to be back there on the inside of her eyelids. ‘There was a guy who came in a lot.’ She glanced up at Sandor. ‘I thought he was nice. Professional. Sort of – calm. He started telling me that I could be better, that I had potential.’ Always in a navy-blue suit, always buying one drink for himself and one for her, which she’d sip slowly all night. ‘He offered me a better job in a club of his. More hours, if I wanted them, three times as much money. It was –’ she looked up at him again. ‘A strip club. The classier end, whatever that is.’

Sandor still hadn’t moved, his scarred cheek resting on his fist. ‘He make you work there?’

‘No. Not like that.’ She rubbed her thumb along the curved line of her palm. ‘No, I just worked behind the bar.’ The muted flash of Petyr’s eyes as he smiled, a smile that was always thoughtful and in control.

Breathe, she told herself. In, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four. If you breathed calmly, your body would have no choice but to relax too, that’s what her counsellor had said.

‘He – it’s hard to explain how it happened. He was good to me, gave me extra work, and he persuaded me to stop taking some of the drugs I was taking. Said I was better than that. He talked to me about the business, explained the books. He made me feel important, and necessary. I sort of fell for him, and wondered why he never made a proper move. We would go out to eat sometimes, quite late after I’d finished work, but he’d never do anything. I guessed he had a partner somewhere – he sometimes wore a wedding ring.’

She looked as far as Sandor’s stomach. ‘Anyway, one night he did take me somewhere, to an apartment, a really nice one. And he –’ A deep, calm breath. ‘Imprisoned me in there.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He took me up, and we just kissed, and – I don’t know, I was drunk and tired, and I guess I’d gone to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning, the door was locked and he wasn’t there.’

It sounded so idiotic. She looked up at Sandor, who had the slightest frown forming. She rubbed a hand over one eye. ‘When he came back, I had a go at him, but he – he had a way. With words. He was just really persuasive. He said I was his, that I was a beautiful object to be owned, and I would be his for as long as he wanted. And then he –’ The spike of tears as she swallowed. Salt in her eyes, salt in her throat. ‘He brought people. Men.’

Sandor went still.

Sansa let one breath out, felt the weight of it. Her fingers were going cold. 

‘Men?’ Sandor said.

She nodded. ‘He would just watch. They could do whatever they wanted, and he would just watch.’ Her words had deadened. 

His thumb tucked under his fingers into a fist. She watched the knuckles whiten, and it was as if she was floating now, above the two of them here, and above herself, back in that apartment. 

‘He had a power over me. I never said no. I didn’t say yes, but I never said no.’

‘How long?’ Sandor’s voice was the lowest she’d ever heard it, and scratched as if someone had keyed it. ‘How long were you in there for?’

‘Two months.’

A dark, stabbed outbreath from him. 

‘He took my phone away, and there was no phone or computer or anything in the apartment. It was high up, and the windows weren’t overlooked by anyone. Once I made a paper aeroplane message and sent it out the window, but no one came. And so I just sort of gave up. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t comfortable. I mean, it wasn’t like I was in a concrete cell. I just – I had such low self-esteem, after everything that had happened with – with my family, that – he’d got to me when I’d reached the bottom. I didn’t care about myself. So I would just lie in that place, not thinking anything, dreading the sound of the door handle.’

Sandor had brought his tight fist up to his mouth, the thumb knuckle against his teeth, watching her.

‘I drank a lot of vodka. I was mostly out of it.’ Blurred days, one into the other. Posh ready meals and canapés in the fridge after she said she didn’t want to cook, lying on the sofa watching TV eating olives and caperberries and bloody _quince_.

‘One day, I don’t know, I was just watching the TV, some kids' show about a brother and sister escaping from a monster, and I just thought – _no_. I need to go. Now. And I waited ‘til he came into the room one night alone – he didn’t always come with someone else, sometimes he just sat and talked to me – and I hit him over the head with the vodka bottle and got the keys and ran the hell out of there.’

She let out a shuddering breath, as if she’d been in an ice-bath, the strength she’d drawn from to get through telling him totally spent. ‘I spent a couple of nights on the street and then I went to a shelter for a few days, and they helped me find Arya. She was already at Brienne’s, and Brienne took me in too.’

***

As she told him, he watched her hands, which had started flat on her thighs, before her fingers curled in towards each other, palms turning upwards. Finally her hands slid round to her upper arms, and she clutched herself as if otherwise she might come apart at the seams.

Christ.

He’d seen all sorts – his brother, Joff Baratheon, plenty in between, and heard all sorts of shit said about women. But nothing like that, and not to a girl like this one. He pictured this man she spoke of, some weasel-faced fucking cunt, and putting his hand round his chin from behind, pulling back and to the side, hard, feeling the crack of his neck. He’d always wanted to kill his brother. Now he wanted to kill a man he didn’t know.

But he knew that wasn’t the thing to say now. ‘You went to the police?’

She shook her head and his heart sank. ‘Brienne always said I should, and Arya too, but the thing is – I went into it willingly. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but –’ she looked at him. ‘Maybe you’ve never seen the stats, but this sort of thing – these sorts of crimes – the conviction rate is really low.’

He bit down on what he wanted to say. 

‘I’d have to go to court. I’d have to testify in front of him.’ She looked up. ‘I’d have to look at him. He manipulated me. I’m – I’m afraid he’d do it again.’ She grew quiet again. ‘He had his ways.’

Her fingernails were digging into her upper arm. Sandor gently removed her hand, and kept it there, resting in his palm. 

‘Fuck,’ she said, lowering her forehead down into her other palm, a fissure crack in her voice. She took a breath, the sort of breath to strengthen a person, and straightened again, looking at him. ‘I want to move on,’ she said. ‘You’re the first person I’ve –’ she shook her head. ‘Been out with. Done anything with, since then. In three years.’ 

Sandor nodded, gazing down at the lines of her palm. Heart line, head line, life line and all the rest. That she would choose that person to be him was a bloody mystery, but he knew then that he had to do this right. ‘Do you want to get off home?’

She looked at him. ‘Do you want me to?’

He went to shake his head. Stopped himself. ‘Whatever you want.’

He watched her swallow, heard the dry little click in her throat. ‘I want to stay. But I can’t –’ the faint deer-like panic in her eyes again. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘Leading you on.’

‘You haven’t. You haven’t, ok? I’m just glad you’re here. Like a bloody miracle.’ A sad, beautiful miracle. 

She almost laughed, but there was a dark shine in her eyes too, and the undersides were almost bruised. She looked fucking tired. 

‘Do you want to watch a film?’ he said.

A small, distant sunrise on her face. ‘Yes.’

Sandor didn’t spend money on much, but he did love his movies, and had the cable subscription to prove it. If he’d had his way, it probably would have been Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or some classic war movie, but he let her choose. And found himself watching that new Ghostbusters, mostly watching the flare of light on Sansa’s face and the slow relaxing of her body into the sofa cushions. Twice she laughed out loud, even though she chewed them away. If there was one thing she deserved, it was watching girls shooting away their ghosts.

By the end of the movie, which was too daft for words, she was next to him, their thighs touching. Hips touching.

‘That was fun,’ she said.

He put his arm out, and she put her head on his shoulder, and then moved it further down to his chest. ‘Careful,’ he said, moving her up a bit again away from his tattoo.

‘Oh my god, sorry,’ she said, her ear on his shoulder again. ‘I can’t believe I forgot.’

‘No scratching, no baths, no having girls lying on it, you said.’

A breath-laugh through her nose, and an exhale that sounded like she might cry. But she didn’t. She shifted a bit, one elbow tucking underneath her, the other coming out tentatively, resting over his stomach. He listened to her breaths as they slowed and smoothed, and as she went to sleep.

***

Sansa woke up facing the sofa cushions, the weight and warmth of Sandor behind her. His arm was around her waist and there was a blanket over them both. She’d stayed here, and she’d told him everything, and it had been alright. She’d been safe.

Her phone was on the table. There was a strange, underground groan from Sandor as he rolled onto his back and she carefully leant over him to pick it up.

_Tell me ur ok FFS_

_I’m fine sis x_

_Jesusfuck_  
_Dont do that 2 me_

_I texted you a million times_  
_But sorry anyway x_

_Sok_  
_Meera says hi_

_Hi back. Love u x_

_Same x_

Sandor shifted and she realised that her elbow had been digging into his stomach. And, even better, that there was a dark patch on his t-shirt sleeve where her face had been resting.

He opened one eye and squinted at her, and just like last night, didn’t say a word. Waiting to see what she’d say, letting her spill her secrets.

‘I drooled on you,’ she said.

He opened his other eye and frowned down at his shoulder, before looking back up at her. ‘You should see what the dogs used to do.’

‘Are you comparing me to a dog?’ She raised an eyebrow, but let him have a smile, too.

‘No. Christ, no. Are you kidding me?’ He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘Though they were pretty dogs. Most of them.’

‘Funny.’

‘Aye.’ He took his hand away. ‘That’s me.’

Her eyes wandered to his scars, and the smile he gave was discomfited, itchy, as if her gaze on him burnt.

‘Thank you for letting me stay. And being – cool about everything.’ She felt raw from telling him - almost hungover, except that she hadn't had a drink in three years.

‘That’s ok.’ He scratched his stomach and screwed his face up at the light straying in from the side of the curtains. Put an arm behind his head. ‘Breakfast?’

‘I should get going.’ Saturday was their busiest day.

Sandor watched her, still sprawled out on the sofa, one of his legs hanging off the side. ‘Make you eggy bread,’ he said, and slowly raised his eyebrows. 

She smiled and put a hand to her chest as if hit by a bullet. 'You got me.'

***

Sandor lied about having things to do in town and on the tube journey she’d tucked her hand into his arm and put her head on his shoulder and not said a word. He had thought again about everything she’d told him, and how many heads he’d break to make it right, all the while knowing that _she’d_ worked hard to make it right – finding her sister, this job, the not-drinking, the counselling she had. 

He’d made her eggy bread with bacon and maple syrup, like his ma used to do about a hundred years ago, and watched her tuck into it with the blanket still round her shoulders. A girl with an appetite. He could definitely spend a lot of time watching her eat.

The little sister was already in Tarth’s Tattoos, and emo bollocks was whining from the speakers. She looked up sharply when the bell went, her face moving quickly through relief to nonchalance, with a bit of murderous suspicion directed straight at him. Well, he understood it now. Almost admired it.

‘Hey,’ said Sansa.

The skinny kid who worked downstairs came in, nodding at the girls and heading straight for the galley kitchen.

‘Nice time?’ said the little one, not to him.

‘Yes, thanks,’ said Sansa, lightly, without looking at Sandor.

The sister glared at everything in sight. A bit longer and the whole place would have probably combusted.

Sansa was taking her bag off her shoulder, rummaging in it. ‘Pep tea please, Jojen,’ she called towards the kitchen.

Sandor felt like a spare part. Well, perhaps that was the end of it. He’d been tested out, and if that’s all it had been, he didn’t mind too much. He’d had a beautiful girl sleep on him. Drool on him. He stretched a bit, his elbow clicking, to make it known he was on the move. Christ, he hadn’t even showered.

Sansa looked up then and came over to the door with him, and stood there with her head level with the dog she’d tattooed on him. ‘Can I see you again?’ she said, very quietly, and her eyes were clear, the summer skies you never got here, and with a trace of careful, guarded hope.

The feeling of something dark and warm in his ribs, like melted chocolate. ‘Aye,’ he said, just as quietly. ‘I reckon you can.’ There was the slightest lowering of her shoulders, the slightest lift of her mouth. ‘I’ll get off.’ He could now. Safe in the knowledge. ‘Ok?’

She nodded, and didn’t move to kiss him, just a quick smile upwards as she mouthed ‘ok’ back, and she was away to her bench, turning an iPad on.

He stood on the street for a second, looking at the bag and shoe shops opposite, wondering which way to go so that it looked like he was moving with intent.

The door opened behind him, and he looked down to find the little sister, Arya, shutting it again and leaning her back on it as she stared up at him. Slate-grey eyes, coldly assessing him. 

‘Do not fuck with her,’ she said, each word with a full stop after it.

‘I won’t,’ he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	5. Chapter 5

The shop was locked, the light on. Sansa was tucked in the corner on the ratty purple sofa with a pad on her lap. She looked up quickly at his knock on the glass, a little heavier than he’d meant. He was just glad to have finally fucking made it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as she opened the door, the bell going. The sight of her came with that sound. He was starting to think that if he ran into her on the street, that bell would still ring to announce her, the appearance of a magical girl. 

‘It’s ok,’ she said. ‘Sucky day to travel. You did pretty well, considering.’ Christ, the sight of her made his heart hurt. Burnt orange hair and eyes you’d find in a jeweller’s palm. That smile.

Three days since he last saw her, and no fucking tube strike and shite weather was going to stop him. She’d said she wanted to see him again. No one had ever said that. He was an hour and a half late, and she still beamed up at him and didn’t seem much bothered.

‘Half an inch of snow and the whole bloody city seizes up,’ he said as he followed her inside, trying not to sound too grouchy about the four buses he’d had to get, all packed to the rafters. He’d sat next to one old bastard who was eating rank-smelling fried chicken, glaring at him until the guy offered him a piece, which hadn’t been the idea. He ate it anyway.

‘A design for someone?’ he said, nodding at the pad in her hand.

She shook her head. ‘Just doodling. It’s not for anyone. Not yet.’ She held it up.

It was a drawing of wolf’s head, from the side, foliage growing from its neck, the pencil strokes of the fur becoming leaves. It took up almost the whole page. ‘I don’t call that a doodle.’

She smiled. ‘I’m just playing around.’

It was warm in here, and she had music on, a lazy, doleful woman’s voice over a guitar. Strength in it, though. The song felt right for her, this dark, beautiful girl and the shit that she had been through. He’d hardly thought of anything else, these last days. 

Sandor rubbed a hand over his hair, the few ashy attempts at snowflakes tumbling off, watching Sansa pick up her coat. Today she was wearing a grey t-shirt, the sleeves high enough to show all of those tattoos, and her hair was done in some science-defying style that didn’t have any clips to hold it up.

‘Hungry?’ she said, turning round. 

I could eat you, he thought, as she put up the furred hood of her parka, Red Riding Hood and then some. ‘Starving.’ He put his hand to his chest.

‘No scratching,’ she said, before he could even attempt it. 

He held both his hands up. I surrender. His inked skin had risen up, scabbed black, and he watched it flake off in the shower, the hair starting to grow back through it. The dog and the man.

She smiled at him and picked up the keys again.

***

‘I had a dog once,’ Sansa said, putting another chip in her mouth. 

‘What sort?’ said Sandor, who was mostly eating his massive bit of battered fish with his hands.

‘Czechoslovakian wolfdog,’ she said. 

He raised his eyebrows. Perhaps he was expecting her to say something a little smaller. ‘Hence the drawing.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘She was sort of the family mascot.’ The lady of the family, her father had said once, because she would sit far more regally than the three female members of the household. Lady, mottled grey and white, snow and slush colours, who hardly barked, and whose power you only felt when you walked her, pulling you along as if you were on a sledge whizzing through the Arctic. When she thought of Lady, she thought of all of her family. ‘Did you ever breed any of those?’ she said, partly just to stop her sadness.

He shook his head. Told her, through mouthfuls of cod, about the family business. She watched him talk of the kennels, the dogs mostly bred for farming and outdoor work. Border collies and a type called beardies, as well as a few other pedigrees. His dad would part-train them up, he said, at neighbouring sheep farm, but Sandor had just been in charge of feeding and basic house training. 

‘So loads of puppies, then?’ she said.

‘Aye. A fair few. Yapping the night away.’ 

She tried not to grin idiotically at the thought of him, even as a much younger version, covered in puppies. ‘That is very cute.’

‘Not when they’re pissing on you, it’s not.’ He smiled at her, and reached again for the ketchup.

It was so nice, being out with him. They’d taken the back roads down to Spitalfields, the English attempts at snow caught like dust in the streetlights, and she’d put her arm in his. He hadn’t mentioned anything of the other night.

It was her favourite fish and chip shop, with the diner-style tables and ‘60s-dressed waitresses. Sandor was sitting opposite her, wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt with a growling wolf on it, placed a little lower than she knew his tattoo was. He really was a dog person, though clearly it had taken him a long while to get over his trauma. Every time she looked at him, she tried not to think of his brother’s dog tearing at the cheek of the boy he was, and the horror of it. There was a darkness in him underneath the slow smile and the way he attacked his food. Maybe he saw that in her, too.

Now, though, he was eyeing up her lemon sole. ‘You done with that?’

She pulled her plate slightly nearer to her. ‘No.’ And gobbled it up, very quickly, whilst he watched her, unmoving, that glint in his eye.

There was grease on his beard. And a bit of mushy pea. ‘D’you want anything else?’ he said.

‘Sticky toffee pudding,’ she said, without looking at the menu. ‘Share if you like.’

Afterwards, they walked back towards the Overground – he’d said he couldn’t afford taxis now that he wasn’t working – and Sansa grew quiet, knowing this was the point when he would expect her to go back with him, knowing how it ended up last time. Her pushing him away with her heels, the quick surprise on his face.

They stopped just under the old railway bridge, its walls covered with graffiti. Neither of them said anything for a moment, the easy way they had talked all evening dissolving like the snow at their feet.

Sandor squinted up at it before looking back at Sansa. ‘Don’t feel you have to come back with me.’ She looked up at him as his eyebrows lifted the smallest amount. ‘I think maybe you went a wee bit too fast for yourself last time.’ 

A little lump in her chest. ‘I’ve put you off.’ She’d freaked him out too much. It was understandable. Who would want someone like her, after what she’d told him?

‘No.’ Spoken so simply. ‘I’ll still be here.’ A quick, sidelong glance at her. ‘If you want.’

‘I do want,’ she said.

He put his hands in his back pockets and rolled a bit of gravel back and forth under his boot. ‘You decide. What you want to do. When you want to.’

‘Thank you.’

She liked the way he smiled, hardly moving his mouth but the spark coming slowly into his eye. ‘Can I still get a kiss, though?’ he said.

There was a sweet, gentle pain in her stomach. ‘ _Yes_.’ 

He leant down to her, and she put a hand on either side of his beard as their lips met, and a short goodnight kiss became a long one. 

***

He always left it up to her. And so the first few times, he’d see her off at the door of the tattoo place, imagine her getting up to bed like a teenager, having to share. Sansa had said sometimes she and her sister had to make schedules so that Arya could have her lass in there.

They mostly stuck to East London, pubs in the shadow of the city’s oldest churches, a few walks in Victoria Park, eating cheap Vietnamese food served by a crazy and unintelligible old lady, a free gig at Rough Trade East, bashing his ears further. He went with her and her mad little sister, who had a different hair colour every other week, to some rollergirl derby thing at York Hall. A place that hosted boxing for East End skinheads and their families was given over to a load of terrifying lasses yelling and attacking each other with sticks. Arya’s girlfriend’s roller girl nickname was Reed Me And Weep.

They ate a ton. She almost matched him, forkful for forkful, and he loved watching her lean over her plate, elbows stuck outwards, stuffing her face. 

‘How the hell are you so bloody slim?’ he’d said.

‘Running.’ She had run a finger along her teeth and grinned. ‘Yoga.’

After a while, Sansa came back to his again, and he never made a move past what they’d done before, always letting her initiate something new, however small. It was like being a teenager himself all over again – or what he imagined teenagers did, one base at a time. He’d just been chucked right in aged twenty, the first of many drunk girls, him also off his head in some shite Camden dive, a kiss up against a toilet wall turning to an orgasm up in about two minutes. And lo, he’d popped his cherry.

This was the opposite. Lazy, exploring, one tiny step at a time. She would sit on top of him, her elbows on his shoulders, kissing him as if they were in slow-motion. He would listen to her breath, hear the catch in it that meant she’d have to stop for a bit. And then back she’d go. Christ, it wasn’t as if Sandor didn’t have to sneak off to the bathroom once or twice to sort himself out, but he could take it. He could see that she needed it to be this way. 

Finally, one night with rain bashing down outside, she pulled back. ‘Sandor,’ she said. 

He gave her a hum which was partly directed at his cock to tell him to sit the fuck down.

‘I’m ready,’ she said. And stood up, holding her hand out.

***

That night, Sansa let go of his hand as she entered his bedroom.

She’d been in here a few times before, sleeping on him or beside him, getting used to his warmth, and the feel of his arm underneath her neck.

‘Your bed is very big,’ she’d said that first time.

‘Aye, well, I’m a big guy,’ he’d said, and they had looked at each other, sheepish smiles coming at the same time. And yet he hadn’t pushed her, not that time, not ever. He would sit back, his hands drifting on her thighs, but never do something new until she had first. It was as if he’d cleared a path for her, just by letting her be in control.

Now, though, she’d brought him here. It was time. She looked at the floor as she took a breath in, trying to bring her confidence back.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said, and her smile was chased away. He leant down. ‘I’m sort of hoping to do the opposite,’ he said, very quietly. 

***

Christ, it wasn’t like it normally was. Normally the girl was high as hell or drunk or both and she’d be loud or all stage whispers and hysterics, and always something fucking weird – wanting to be whipped with her bra or slapped, or even shat on, once. He’d got himself a cab sharpish that time. Or they were practically comatose by the time they’d got into a bedroom, slurring their words and falling over and he could hardly be bothered. 

This felt really different. He’d always been sober, those few times after work, but she was too, now. Really fucking sober. And quiet. You could have heard a pin drop. 

She didn’t come. 

***

‘You ok?’

Sansa turned her head to look at him. He was lying on his side, the sheet drawn over his hips, gazing at her. A sheen of sweat on his temple. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

For such a big man, he’d been incredibly gentle. She was sure he was holding himself back, and there was just the force of his breath when he came in her, a harsh gust of it. And it didn’t hurt, and she didn’t feel scared, or obliged. He’d had a hand underneath her bottom, and she imagined him lifting her up, holding her like something precious. Another hand under her shoulder blade. She’d listened to the traffic outside and the sounds of their breath, lodging against each other.

They hadn’t said a single word. He hadn’t said how tight she was, what a wanting bitch she was, how much she wanted his cock. He hadn’t talked about her as if she wasn’t there. They had rolled onto their sides, her leg squashed underneath him, and his hands had been so warm, and he had stared at her as he’d moved.

It had felt good.

‘You didn’t tell me you had more,’ he said, running a finger over the feather on her side, the birds breaking away from it. She remembered lying down as Brienne tattooed her, and feeling calmer than she had in years. Arya had done the tiny arrow on her other side and the flowers on her hip.

‘I thought I’d keep them as a surprise,’ she said. 

***

It wasn’t a miracle or anything, that first time. She still had anxiety attacks after that, more than once, and part of him felt crushed that it was his presence making her think back to other nameless men, all of whom he wanted to kill. But he would tell himself to fucking get a grip, and he knew, after all, how damned lucky he was just to have this woman near him.

At other times, though, it was bloody sweet as brandy, the two of them sliding together. He kept his darker thoughts to himself, because this was always better, to have her gasping in his ear, once he’d worked out the best ways to make her come. The sight of her tattoos as her clothes came off turned him the hell on every time.

‘I don’t want you to do anything,’ she said one early morning as they lay side by side, the sound of planes overhead and birds mixed in with it.

‘How do you mean?’ he said, knowing exactly what she meant.

‘I don’t want you to find him. I know you think about it.’

He had. All the time. Imagined tracking that bastard down – she’d never told him the guy’s name – fucking him up, leaving him in a half-open grave somewhere outside London.

‘If you – did something to him, I wouldn’t see you again,’ she said.

Not if I covered my tracks, he thought. 

‘I don’t want him to be in my life,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked so hard to get him out of it. It will only bring him back in.’

Sandor had nodded, and slid an arm about her waist, brought her into him so that his nose was in her hair.

He found him anyway. Worked out what clubs it might have been from other things Sansa had said over the months together, went to three before he saw him. He knew him straightaway – the navy blue suit, leaning on the bar, lean weasel-eyes surveying his cheap, nearly-naked kingdom. Sandor had watched him from behind a beer at a table in the corner, planned how he’d come up behind him, smash his face to a bloody pulp on the edge of the bar until he begged through broken teeth, until his brains were bleeding out of his fucking ears. And then he’d got up, left his beer half-drunk, went out into the daylight, back out east.

This time.

***

For three years, she’d worked so hard at making herself better. Studying, counselling, the job, the holistic things that made her a big hippie, not that she cared. But she’d never been able to face having any sort of relationship. And now she was in one. They’d never addressed it as such, but slowly, tentatively, it was turning into something.

The nights had mostly got better. Sandor didn’t mind that she wanted the lights off, and she’d lie still while he traced the lines of her with a finger. She would do the same, leaning on an elbow, smoothing her hand over his tattoo, the hair on his stomach, between his thighs, until all his muscles stiffened. She always decided when they would have sex - he didn’t once ask, but allowed her to move him onto his back, sit on top of him. It was the opposite of everything that had happened to her before.

Before that, in the evenings, she would sit cross-legged on his sofa, college books on her lap, while he made some dinner for them both. He was a lovely cook, beating her own lazy attempts at noodles and pasta hands down, dishing up chicken with pesto he’d blitzed himself, or macaroni cheese with chorizo.

‘Arya’s getting jealous,’ she said later, at the table, as he set down a proper chilli with sour cream, cheese and coriander leaf, the full works. ‘Of how well I’m eating.’ Her sister would just get takeaways, curries and chips and Chinese food, and leave the cartons everywhere. Burp.

‘Then she should learn to cook,’ he said, sitting down and unscrewing the wine bottle cap. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

‘When did you learn?’

‘At home,’ he said. ‘My dad wasn’t all that.’

Sansa felt a pang of guilt. She’d spent so much time trying to work through her own problems, her own nerves with him, that she had not asked him enough. Though in truth, she’d never been sure how deep to delve – he could turn in on himself a little, when there was any mention of his family.

‘When did your Mum die?’ she said later on the sofa, carefully. No passing away or something to that effect. They’d both lost their parents, and death was the only word for it.

He stiffened for a moment, before putting his arm behind her head. ‘I was five.’

‘Oh god.’ A flash of an image, a little boy in wellies, looking out over fields, motherless.

He shrugged. ‘It’s just how it was.’

‘How did she die?’

‘Cancer. Right bastard version.’ 

‘Sandor. I’m so sorry.’ She put a hand on his thigh and neither of them spoke for a while. ‘How did your dad die?’

‘Heart attack.’ She had moved closer to him, her bent knee on top of his leg. ‘It’s ok. I’m fine,’ he said, looking over at her. Dark clouds in his eyes, the rain after the storm, proving that he wasn’t, not completely. ‘At least I had some time, you know. In between the two.’

‘You’re still without them.’

‘Aye. Well.’ He looked over at her. ‘You find new people.’

***

Sandor got some work. There was only so much time that he could spend dossing around, spending all his cash on posh ingredients to impress the woman who seemed to be becoming his girlfriend, if he dared believe it. He did short-term contracts – security work for a couple of clubs on Old Street, a construction site, a warehouse way up north. He’d come back wiped out, knackered, trying to work out why the hell he was doing it. 

The answer was under his arm, watching The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with him, scratching her elbow and settling back into his side. 

He sighed.

‘Are you ok?’ she said.

‘Just tired.’ 

He kept mentally pinching himself, how she’d now travel east to see him, and be happy enough sitting on the sofa with him rather than out and about. She’d shrug off her own tiredness after a day eyeballing bare flesh – something he’d just about got over, though seeing her crouched over some man’s inner thigh once had tested him.

He met the owner of Tarth’s Tattoos, too, the biggest woman he’d ever seen, tanned from a long holiday in Sicily and armed with a scrutinising glare that could probably strip paint. And he met the guy she’d married, a handsome fucker with TV presenter-levels of charm who Sansa said didn’t have a single tattoo, though Arya constantly joked about what she’d do to him when he was sleeping. Brienne was in the process of slowly moving out to North London – the guy lived in Islington, obviously – so eventually Sansa would get her room, she told him. 

Another sigh. He couldn’t help it. Too many days standing outside shite company buildings, or signing people in at a front desk. Too many hours in the grimiest bits of London, the arse-ends, all the city’s grease. Too many minutes sitting on buses or trains, late in the morning or early at night. He hadn’t meant to go straight back to security work, but it was all he knew how to do. Almost all, he thought, thinking back to those days before his scars, giving some pup a treat for managing to walk at heel. Helping his dad deliver a litter or two in the middle of the night, whilst Gregor was holed up in his room, blasting out music and ignoring their dad’s shouts to come and help.

‘What do you dream about?’ Sansa said, after another red-tinted dream sequence on the screen. 

Gregor, he thought. Dogs, chewing at me. All those men and what they might have done to you. ‘Mountains,’ he said, which wasn’t a lie. He’d told her more than once about the long flanks over to the west – their house had sat in the gentler hills – how they had snow on them until May, the colours of the heather. 

Sansa was watching him and not the blue-haired lass on screen. Those eyes, shaped like almonds. ‘You should go back,’ she said, reading his damned mind.

‘Back where?’

‘To Scotland. You said to me once that if you could be anywhere, you’d be there.’

‘Aye, well I say a lot of things.’ Sandor turned his head, his hands folded together on his stomach. ‘Want me to leave, do you?’ He made his voice dark with amusement, but part of him wasn’t joking. It wouldn’t surprise him. 

She shook her head. ‘I want you to be happy.’

He put an arm round her, and she nestled in again the way she seemed to like, the easiest jigsaw in the world. ‘Seeing you makes me happy,’ he said. 

But he couldn’t shrug off the feeling that she was right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	6. Chapter 6

‘You never stop drawing,’ Sandor said.

‘Don’t I?’ Sansa was lying on top of Sandor, looping her fingernail through the hair on his chest. His thigh was sticky from her.

They’d both had a day off. It had been a bleak afternoon, the rain coming late onto Wanstead Flats, the pondwater black. No sign of fucking spring, let alone summer. But he had taken all that for the apple colour in her cheeks. He liked seeing her tramping about in boots, her raincoat tugged around her. He wouldn’t have imagined that when he’d first set eyes on Sansa, tall and crisp in the tattoo parlour, that she’d be happy enough in the mud, twigs in her hair. But she’d grown up not far from the Lake District and walked most weekends, she’d once said, her eyes wintering. 

He’d gone up north – proper north, north of the border – at the weekend, visiting his aunt on his mother’s side, who was ill and asking for him. Sansa had had too much college work to come. Being back in the place of clear, clean skies and evergreen smells had been like a punch in the heart. ‘Come back up here,’ his aunt had said, her hacking cough worse with each breath. ‘Make something of yourself.’

He’d thought of it all afternoon back in East London, watching Sansa splodge in the puddles ahead of him. Their pissingly cold walk had been chased up with some old men playing jazz in the back room of a pub by the canal further into town, and then back to his. Wine, for him at least. Sex. 

‘He’s looking good,’ she said, her voice as light as net curtains, tracing around his tattoo.

Christ, he was wiped. Fresh air and this woman on him. ‘Well, it’s your handiwork,’ he said, and put a hand on her back, working down the tiny rocks of her spine.

‘It doesn’t feel like mine, now, though. It feels like yours. You.’ She ran a finger along the side of the dog’s jaw, the dark, moonlit side, in the way that she sometimes did on his own face. ‘I love him.’

The words were so simple, but the long silence after that shaped them, made them sing in the light.

‘He loves you too,’ he said.

***

‘So she bent over his cock, yeah,’ said Arya, who was outlining a fifth rose on her client’s shoulder. ‘And as she pierced it, he came in her eye.’

‘Oh my god,’ said Sansa, bursting out laughing. 

Arya grinned. ‘She ran out of the piercing room and down the road fucking screaming.’ 

‘Oh, dear Lord,’ said Brienne. She was leaning over the arm of a regular, a sailor with a rich, chocolatey laugh and stories about mermaids he’d shagged. The sailor chuckled.

‘Blimey,’ said Arya’s client, a green-eyed woman who obviously had a thing for roses, seeing as she was covered in them. ‘That’s not very seemly. Has that ever happened to you?’ she said to Jojen, who was perched on the bannister, rolling a cigarette.

‘I live in hope,’ he said.

Sansa had finished her client – a lovely older bearded Geordie whose partner bit his nails nervously throughout – early. Now she was drawing wolves again, when she wasn’t listening to Arya’s latest tattoo parlour horror-gossip. It was a compulsion – she’d been dreaming of Lady her whole adult life, but lately there had been wolves, too. She’d always thought of her family as a pack of them, variously sleek and ragged, padding around side by side. 

‘What up, dickface,’ Arya said, without lifting her head, as the bell went.

Sansa looked towards the door. It never got old, seeing Sandor walk in, even after six months. She always had that little stomach-flare, part nerves and part happiness. Even moreso now, after their last night together, when she’d sort of said that she loved him without realising it, and he’d sort of said it back. 

‘I don’t know what the hell I ever did to you,’ Sandor said to Arya, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Arya raised an eyebrow as she continued with her work. Her client smiled at him, stretching her leg and gracefully twisting her foot around, totally unfazed by the tattoo gun. 

‘Hello, Sandor,’ said Brienne, rather more courteously. At the beginning, she had gently grilled Sansa about him, watched them keenly, but he seemed to have passed the test. She was hardly his best friend, but they seemed to get on ok. Jaime was easier with him on the couple of nights they’d all had out together, but then he was easy with everyone in the whole world. 

Sandor nodded at Brienne.

‘I’m done,’ Sansa said to Sandor, putting her pad in her bag. ‘I made it snappy.’ A beam, just for him, one she didn't have to fake as she sometimes did to clients who’d chosen something awful. She loved how he drank her smiles up, as lazily as his whisky, blinking slowly as if keeping it for later.

‘What are you two up to tonight?’ said Brienne.

‘Film. Pub,’ Sansa said, taking his hand and leaning up for a kiss.

‘Don’t come in her eye,’ Arya called as they left.

***

They went to the Ten Bells in the shadow of Spitalfields Church, and never too noisy on a Monday evening – the one time they’d gone on a weekend, he’d had to work hard not to start a fight with the bunch of kids elbowing his bloody ribs. Tonight, they had a creaky brown leather sofa to themselves and were sharing a basket of chips whilst Sansa went on about something called the Bechdel Test. He’d not minded three hours of a film about a guy fighting a bear, but Sansa hadn’t been so keen. 

‘You know what I said,’ Sansa said, putting her glass down and leaning back into his side. She was wearing his Harley Davidson t-shirt, and looking way better than he ever did in it. 

‘About what,’ said Sandor, knowing exactly what she meant, because her voice had just changed, and because he hadn’t thought about anything else in the past twenty-four hours. It made him sick to think about it. No one had ever said what he thought she’d said. Not to him. 

Sansa curled further into him, her head tucked into his neck. She smelt of Appletiser. ‘Last night. You know,’ she said, her voice almost disappearing.

He rested his head on hers. ‘Aye, maybe.’

They watched two girls at the bar, one doing a little dance whilst the other filmed it on her phone. 

‘It’s true,’ Sansa said. ‘I do love you.’

The words were like wings, opening out, taking flight. 

‘I love you too,’ he said. A strange, light emptiness in his stomach suddenly, as if something that had festered there was leaving him.

Neither of them moved. The feel of her there, the weight of her head supporting his. 

‘Come home with me,’ Sandor said.

There was a little breathy laugh from her, before she sat up a little, away from him. ‘You said that the first time.’ A hand on his stomach. ‘You don’t have to ask anymore. You know I’m coming home with you. Unless you want to come back to mine.’ Brienne had moved out to Islington with the smug-bastard husband a while ago, so she had her own room these days. ‘It’s nearer.’ 

‘I don’t mean that.’ The drink, giving him courage. 

Her eyes settled on him, dug in a little. A frown. ‘Home?’

‘Aye.’ 

‘You’re going – home?’ There was a stillness in her face, a contrast to the daft indie music playing and the two girls larking about.

‘No. I don’t know.’ Hearing her say the words made it sound real. ‘Thinking about it.’ He watched her face.

‘I can’t,’ she said, and the words sounded trapped.

Too soon, he thought. Idiot. 

Sansa swallowed. ‘Arya,’ she said, and he realised that it was nonsense, what he’d suggested. An impossibility.

That lightness in his stomach was replaced by something solid, and heavy as cement. ‘I know,’ he said. He put a hand on her knee, wondering if he’d destroyed everything, knowing it was too late to take it back. ‘But I still had to ask.’

Fuck.

***

‘Sis.’

Sansa looked up from her cross-legged position on the bed. 

Arya pointed at her. ‘You, me, Meera, Strawberry Cheesecake Häagen-Dazs and as many episodes of Stranger Things as we can watch before we pass out through tiredness, fear, sugar rush or all three of the above.’

‘Not now,’ Sansa said, looking at her page of wolves again. 

It had ended oddly, two nights ago. Not badly as such, but once she’d said no to Sandor, they’d both had a sadness that was hard to shake off. She’d known from how he’d talked about his visit to Aberdeenshire how much he had missed it. The warmth in his voice, even though he’d tried to be matter-of-fact, the distant skies in his eyes. She had been telling him for months that he should think about going back into working with dogs. 

Arya was banging the handle of her door into the wall. ‘Tell me what part of the equation is not working for you. It’s monster-fear, it’s not real.’

‘I don’t feel like it.’

She couldn’t. It was too soon. It had only been six months. Her sister was here, her only living family, her life-thread. Brienne was like a big sister, or a cousin or an aunt. Her world had shrunk to a few graffitied streets, and it had always felt safe, even with the odd homeless person stumbling in from the church, or people high on whatever they’d been dealt round the corner. The idea of leaving terrified her.

‘Is it the ice cream? It’s, like, all you ever eat.’

Her college stuff. She had exams to do. Qualifications to get.

Arya sat down next to her. ‘Show me.’ She leant over and studied the wolves. ‘Sick.’ She jabbed a finger at one. ‘I’d totally get that.’

Sansa let out a sigh. 

‘Seriously, SanSan. What is with you? Is it Sandor? What’s he done? I’ll smack that bitch up for you.’

‘You can’t,’ said Sansa, to her drawings. ‘He doesn’t deserve it.’

‘Tell me, then. Don’t go all silent treatment on me.’

Sansa lay back on her bed, and told her.

***

He’d fucked it all up. Of course he had. It had been going fucking great, perfect, they’d fucking said the word _love_ to each other, and straight after that he’d gone and stabbed himself in the stomach with a rusty blade, because he was incapable of having anything good.

Love. She’s changed her mind, he thought, sneaking a glance at her in the noisy-as-fuck pub, the gay one on Redchurch Street. They were out with Arya and Meera and Jojen, not that he’d wanted to – the crazy little sister, whose hair was now Hubba Bubba pink, had insisted, giving him a death-glare.

Sansa was by his side, hands in her lap, looking over at him occasionally from behind her hair. Melancholy, like some actor in a – he couldn’t think of the right word for it, some theatre style where they had beautiful masks with a teardrop painted at the corner of one eye. The two of them hadn’t had a chance to talk yet.

‘That dude is totally checking you out,’ said Arya, prodding Jojen.

The piercer kid, who was economical with his speech at the best of times, looked non-committally over. ‘Which one?’

‘With the ‘tache. Looks Cuban or something.’

Jojen gazed towards the guy leaning on the bar, who was raising one eyebrow in his direction. He seemed familiar somehow. Jojen stood, and stretched half-heartedly. ‘Later,’ he said in their general direction and drifted over.

‘I’m going to the loo,’ said Sansa suddenly, standing and only just about turning back to give Sandor a faint, guilty smile before walking to the corner.

Sandor drank half of his pint. Yep. He’d fucked everything up. When he put his glass down, the little sister was staring at him with one of her usual flint-eyed faces on. He sighed. ‘What?’

‘She told me what you asked her,’ Arya said.

Great. ‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’ll just be having a smoke,’ said Meera, rising. She was the opposite of her girlfriend. Subtle, attuned to people’s moods. 

Arya drummed her fingernails on the table. Machine-gun fire. ‘It’s made her go all quiet.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Sad.’ She made the word sound accusatory.

He nodded. ‘Right.’

‘You can’t fucking take off on her. That would be – a killable action.’

‘As in you’ll kill me?’

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Maybe.’

She looked like she was about to say something else when Sansa was suddenly back again, holding her elbows like she did when she felt worried, or sad. He’d made her like that. 

***

Everything felt wrong, so soon after everything had felt so right. Sansa knew that Scotland tugged at Sandor. She knew she couldn’t go. She could not bear the idea of him leaving her. She was in a noisy pub surrounded mostly by cheerful gay men, and she couldn’t tell him.

‘Jesus. How does he make it look so easy?’ Arya said, as Jojen and the man she’d pointed out to him turned from the bar and walked towards the door. The man was older, very good-looking, with a moustache that made him look like a smiling villain in one of the Sergio Leone westerns that Sandor liked. 

‘I know him,’ said Sandor, suddenly, and stood up, following them out.

Arya looked at her sister. ‘What’s that about?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sansa, and they got up.

A little further down the road, Sandor was just tapping Jojen’s pick-me-up on the shoulder as they caught up with him. ‘I know you,’ he was saying.

The man seemed in no way intimidated. ‘Many people know me,’ he said, in a thick accent that was perhaps Spanish or Portuguese. A smile, at Sandor first, and then at Sansa and Arya behind him, and Meera, drifting up with the last of her cigarette.

Sandor was staring down at him. ‘You killed my brother.’

‘Shit,’ said Arya under her breath.

‘Woah,’ said Meera at the same time.

Sansa instantly knew who he must be. The boxer, Oberyn Martell, the featherweight who had bet one million pounds on beating the heavyweight, Gregor, in a match that probably wasn’t legal. He had been found not guilty of manslaughter, due to some very expensive lawyers.

Oberyn Martell’s smile had instantly disappeared, replaced by a genuine solemnity. ‘You are a Clegane?’

‘Aye.’

Oberyn turned his head to look at a wall with a geisha painted on it. A measured sigh as he turned back, straightening it. ‘You have my every sincere apology. I will take whatever punishment you choose to give me.’ A gracious half-bow. ‘However severe.’

Everyone was very still, looking at the two men as they gazed at each other. Jojen hadn’t moved his hand from the cigarette in his mouth. A group of city workers walked by, one of the women shrieking as her stiletto heel got caught.

‘No need,’ said Sandor. ‘He took my life.’ His eyes flickered to Sansa’s. ‘A lot of it. About time someone took his.’

Oberyn did not sigh with relief, but there was a loosening in his shoulders. ‘I am sorry to hear that. But I am not surprised. Gregor Clegane did some things to my family that needed to be revenged.’

Sandor nodded. ‘I don’t doubt it.’

It was bizarre, the death of his brother being discussed in such simple words, with no aggression. They looked at each other for a moment longer, before Oberyn put out his hand. ‘I wish you fortune and love in your life,’ he said. ‘If I can ever do anything for you, do not hesitate.’

A short moment before Sandor took it, wordlessly. Oberyn glanced at Jojen, who finally took the cigarette out of his mouth, and nodded. The slightest suggestion of a wink. They walked down the street, side by side, towards Brick Lane.

‘Jesus. That is some heavy shit,’ said Arya quietly to Meera, as she took her hand, looking up at Sandor and over to Sansa. ‘Home?’ Meera nodded, and they stared walking north towards the 1930s flats.

Sandor glanced at Sansa, seemed to be about to say something, and instead closed his mouth and began to follow them. 

Fortune and love, Oberyn had said. 

‘Sandor,’ Sansa said, and he stopped. Turned around. The streetlight made his eyes seem even darker, somehow. He stood, hands by his sides.

Sansa walked up to him. Didn’t touch him. ‘Will you wait for me?’

His eyebrows came down. ‘Where are you going?’ He looked past her down the street.

‘I don’t mean now. I mean -’ she gazed up at him and tried to add weight to her words, things that could be held in his hand. ‘Will you wait for me?’ She wanted him to go and she didn’t want him to leave. 

This time he understood. His frown didn’t go away exactly, but his eyes changed. ‘Aye,’ he said.

***

Sandor was sitting on the deep pink sofa in Sansa and Arya’s tiny living room above the tattoo parlour, swiping through articles on the world’s latest shite on his phone. Waiting. 

The end of autumn. Sansa had sat all her college exams last month, and he’d been next to her the other night as she’d opened the envelopes, watched the light come into her face, like the moon rising. She’d passed everything, of course. Flying colours. Tonight, they were going out to dinner to celebrate with some of her college pals, a motley collection of some bright teenage kid, a couple of single mums, some Somalian guy, and a Polish girl looking to start her own jeweller’s business. 

It had been five months since that time he’d asked her to go to Scotland with him. He’d never said it again. Didn’t want to chance it, not after he came so close to blowing the whole fucking thing. It was enough to have her, he would always tell himself, even though he’d ended up hating this city. He dragged himself through the temp security jobs, never settling, and spent the odd evening when they weren’t together looking at kennels’ websites and Googling images of Aberdeenshire as furtively as if they were porn. 

‘I’m ready.’

Sandor looked up. Sansa was standing there in a fucking lovely little yellow dress that she’d treated herself too. Her hair was all done in braids and tiny metal beads like she was some Anglo-Saxon noble.

He smiled. ‘Ok, princess, let’s go.’ He tucked his phone in his pocket and heaved himself up.

‘No, I mean – I’m ready to go.’ As he stood in front of her, she looked very meaningfully at him. 

He looked at his watch. They should have left already. ‘Aye, so am I.’

‘Sandor.’ She took a step forward put her palms on his chest, where his tattoo was under his shirt. ‘I’m ready.’ She looked at him unblinkingly. ‘To go with you.’

The heat from her palms and the heat from her words spread along his skin. ‘You mean -’ He didn’t dare say it.

‘Yes. I want go north with you.’

He shook his head, a small movement. Stared past her shoulder at the carpet. ‘What about your sister?’

‘She’s cool with it. As long as we have a spare room for her, she said. So she can come up whenever she wants. Well, her exact words were ‘so I can bring my hot girlfriend and freak you out with loud orgasm-noises'. I think she’s already planning to move Meera and Jojen in above the shop.’

‘Of course,’ he said, hardly caring. ‘You really want to?’ He put his hands around her waist, just to make sure she didn’t shatter or melt away, him wake up after some drooling nap on that too-low sofa of theirs.

Her arms slid around his ribs, rested on top of his arms. ‘I don’t know anything about dogs, apart from my own one, but I’m ready to learn.’ 

‘We could breed them, you know,’ he said. ‘Wolfdogs.’

She smiled at him, her eyes still careful, little searchlights. ‘And I thought – I know we won’t be in a city, but I could do a bit of tattooing. Start a business, eventually.’ The slightest sheepishness in her face. ‘I’ve got my BTEC now, you know.’ 

Fuck. He’d do fucking anything for her. He’d lay down on smouldering ashes. ‘You have.’ He squeezed her gently, though probably not gently enough. ‘And you can. You can do whatever you like.’ 

She gazed a little past him, maybe already dreaming of it. He couldn’t imagine her starting some tattoo parlour in the middle of nowhere, but who the hell knew. Everyone bloody had them now. Farmers and foresters wouldn’t be any different. ‘You can be my first model,’ she said, her eyes sliding back. Looking a little sly. ‘A walking advert for me.’

‘I’ve got a tattooist for life, then, have I?’ 

Her eyes changed. The colour deepened, a summer sky being taken by twilight, and he realised what he’d just said. For life. There he went again, too much too soon, shooting his mouth off. 

‘Yes,’ she said.

Christ. Sandor’s heart hurt. ‘You sure about this? Not just the exam elation talking?'

She shook her head. ‘I know we haven’t talked about it but that didn’t mean I stopped thinking about it. Thank you for waiting.’

I’d walk on fucking snakes for you, he thought, as he moved one hand up to her neck, into the underside of her hair, a couple of those metal beads clinking together. Kissing her. 

Kiss after kiss, the yellow and amber of her and the silver grey of him. They were definitely going to be late now. 

Sansa pulled back. ‘Actually, Arya said I could go on one condition.’ She grinned.

***

‘Right, motherfucker,’ said Arya.

She was sitting in her favoured tattooing position, one leg bent and squashed underneath her, snapping the wrist of one of her gloves. Sandor had his forearm stretched out on the arm of her black chair, and Sansa was sitting next to him.

‘Do you say that before you start torturing all your clients?’ Sandor said.

‘Nope,’ said Arya, wheeling back round to him. ‘Just you.’ She narrowed her eyes at his arm. 

The clause in Arya’s contract had been for the three of them to get wolf tattoos, which they could choose from all of Sansa’s drawings. ‘You’re ours for life,’ she’d said, ‘whether you fucking like it or not.’ It was her way of making him keep a promise, and Sandor had hardly raised an eyebrow. He seemed to have been expecting worse.

‘You’d better fucking get this right,’ Sandor said to Arya, glancing at Sansa, who’d already had hers done on her shoulderblade in the morning. She gave his other arm a squeeze. She’d do Arya’s tomorrow.

Sansa remembered Sandor first coming in, almost a year ago, and the wariness in him as she’d leant over his chest. And she remembered the fear in her, too, on those first dates. Now he sat, stiffly enough, but with not a care in the world about doing something more permanent than vows or rings. Maybe they’d do that too, one day, she thought. But she was getting ahead of herself. One step at a time. 

‘Bruv. I’m a ninja,’ Arya said, and got to work. 

***

Sandor watched the girl slide down the pole, the little underwear she had on a bit classier probably than some establishments. The music was too loud, an extra layer that no one in here seemed to notice, too busy looking at the stage and their own faces in their drinks.

His flat was packed up into boxes. He was picking up the van tomorrow. He just had one last thing to do before he left. 

‘Having a good night?’ The man next to him in the navy blue suit, the little pin on his lapel, who he’d sat next to deliberately, had leant over.

‘You Baelish?’ Sandor said.

The man’s eyes narrowed, but he retained the sheen of amiability. ‘I am. I don’t think I have had the pleasure.’ Irish, by the sounds of it.

Sandor finished his pint and placed it carefully down on the bar. ‘And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?'

'I'm sorry?'

'Pleasure.'

There was a tiny twitch in Baelish’s cheek. ‘It is my trade, yes.’

‘Not forever it’s not.’

A slow, wary smile. ‘I don’t quite follow.’ 

Sandor sniffed. ‘Someone’ll come for you, one day.’ He turned to look at him. ‘When you’re sleeping in your bed. It’ll hurt.’ He placed his palms on the bar and pushed himself up. Left, the music thumping him out of there. 

It was enough. Enough for him to have seen that split-second hint of fear in the man’s eyes before he blinked it away, to know it would haunt him. Enough to know that if Sandor wanted to, he could call on someone to do what he’d just promised. Enough for him to be able to leave this place with all its ragged energy, its sharp edges, its grime and its treasures, and take his princess north. Somewhere where no one would ever hurt her. 

Silver skies and amber trees, and the two of them, inked, at the heart of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>     
> Ta for reading, chaps!


End file.
